SOURCE: "Christopher Smart Must Slay the Dragon (A Note on Smart's Satire)," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XVII, Nos. 2-3, 1967, pp. 115-19.

In this essay, Hart demonstrates how the satire in Smart's work reveals a fear of cuckoldry and sexual impotence.

A good deal of satire appears throughout the works of Christopher Smart, and the writers on Smart have taken adequate notice of how he is related in his own times to Butler, Dryden, Pope, Gay, and others in the general way satire functioned in the eighteenth century. My purpose here is to leave these areas of general concern and attempt to show how satire functioned personally for Smart in his statement of hopes for himself in life and how, as hope died, he used satire to condition himself to the acceptance of failure.

"The writer of comedy," wrote Mr. James Sutherland in the first chapter of English...