Photo: Source: National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 3780
Christopher Smart, engraving of an oil painting by an unknown artist, Date ca. 1745
A popular 18th-century English poet and magazine writer, the prodigious drinker and spendthrift Christopher Smart was incarcerated from 1756 to 1763 for a form of religious madness that compelled him to pray constantly, often in the street. During this confinement for religious mania, he wrote the long poem Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb) from which our poem today is taken.
