Sonic Boom: A Song to David , Periodization, and the Enchantment of Rhythm

Abstract: "Sonic Boom" emphasizes the sonic virtuosity of A Song to David and explores the relation between its heightened musicality and its peculiar route to placement in literary history. We should not let one of Smart's masterpieces, the anticipatory Jubilate Agno , supplant all discussion of the very different but equally masterly Song . Whether we position Smart between Pope and Wordsworth or between the Quakers and the Beats, his achievement necessarily alters our understanding of poetic possibilities in the middle of the eighteenth century. As a formally achieved religious ecstasy, the poem alters our sense of what the affordances of eighteenth-century poetry were.