Castles in the Air: Christopher Smart and the Concept of System

System as both concept and genre figures large in eighteenth-century literature. Christopher Smart encountered system as a fact of mid-century authorship and the reality of the madhouse, and each was a contact point for Smart's literary rendering of system in periodicals (The Student) and poetry ("Jubilate Agno"). The Student is Smart's self-systemization, as he internalizes system through the voice of The Student's narrator, Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis. "Jubilate Agno" is a master system, reconciling the meaning of nature in religious, scientific, and poetic terms with a governing method for sublimating to poetic process the closed circuit perfection of a totalizing system.