Two Uncollected Poems by Christopher Smart?

Abstract

On 11 November 1755, Christopher Smart and Richard Rolt signed a contract with the stationer, Thomas Gardner, and the printer, Edmund Allen, to provide material—whether their own or that of collaborators—for a new periodical, to be entitled The Universal Visiter or Monthly Memorialist. The first number of this periodical (henceforth UV) appeared on 1 February 1756, and it ran for twelve monthly numbers, terminating in December 1756.1 The progress of UV was troubled from an early stage. Smart’s health was poor, and assistance in production of material for the periodical—from David Garrick, Charles Burney, Thomas Percy, possibly Arthur Murphy, and most famously Samuel Johnson—was called upon almost immediately. Contributions were not signed but were sometimes identified by initials or other marks. Smart’s own contributions were most prominent in the early numbers, between January and April 1756. A number of Smart’s contributions to UV, in both prose...