It’s the birthday of the brilliant and erratic 18th century poet Christopher Smart, whose reputation sank in his own lifetime when he spent years locked up for madness. (He got a lot of writing done during those years. Who’s crazy now?) Many of us today associate him most strongly with the section of his poem, Jubilate Agno, that begins, “For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey. / For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him…”

Smart was born in 1722 in Shipbourne, Kent, England. His father, the steward for the Vane family’s estate in Durham, died when Smart was just 11, but this failed to ruin his life, as Lord Vane took care of him and had him educated at Durham School. Smart then studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he excelled at poetry. At the same time, he excelled at drinking and running up debt, for which he was arrested in 1747. (What is it with brilliant poets and their obsession with buying clothes?) He fell in love with Anna Maria Carnan, whose stepdaddy—here’s a fun random connection for you—was the publisher John Newbery, for whom the Newbery Medal in children’s literature was later named. Smart and Anna Maria married in secret in 1752 and eventually he was accepted by his father-in-law.

By now he was writing for magazines and writing songs for popular theatre; many of these ventures involved his father-in-law’s support. He published the volume Poems on Several Occasions in 1752 to a somewhat “meh” reception and translated Horace for Newbery in 1755. In 1756 Smart suffered an attack involving fever and delirium; in response, he wrote “Hymn to the Supreme Being, on Recovery from a dangerous Fit of Illness” (1756), which described a conversion experience. Within a year, he was confined to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics for religious mania and continuous prayer. Samuel Johnson wrote, “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.” Smart was released in 1758 but then confined in a private madhouse until 1763 and became permanently estranged from his wife. But in these years he wrote A Song to David (published in 1763), which honored the biblical David as the archetypal divine poet, and Jubilate Agno (only a third of which survives), among other works. Upon his release, he continued to write and struggled greatly with debt, in spite of the support of friends. He was arrested for debt again in 1770 and died on May 20, 1771.

By the time he died, Smart was considered a one-hit wonder (A Song to David), and this continued until the 20th century. When Jubilate Agno was discovered in 1939, many modern poets began to admire him; Benjamin Britten set portions of the poem to music in his festival cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb (1943). It begins: “Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; / Give the glory to the Lord, / And the Lamb. / Nations, and languages, / And every creature / In which is the breath of Life. / Let man and beast appear before him, / And magnify his name together.” (Read the rest right here.)

Have a prudently jubilant Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.