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Kit (Christopher) Smart 1722-71
British poet and writer
After a brilliant career at Cambridge where Smart won the Seatonian prize for sacred poetry five times, he took his talent to London, earning his living as a journalist and poet. There he married Anna Carnan, and they had two daughters.
His writing was seriously interrupted when he developed a form of religious mania. His public fervour was recalled by Samuel Johnson: 'My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street or in any other usual place.' Smart spent the next four years in a private home for the mentally ill in London's Bethnal Green.
In 1763, having left the asylum, he published his best-known poem, A Song to David, which Robert Browning likened to a great cathdral. He continued to write but without commercial success, and died, in poverty, in the King's Bench debtor's prison.
In 1939, Smart's unfinished work, Jubilate Agno, written during his time in the Bethnal Green asylum, was published posthumously as Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam. It is now recognised as an extraordinary work of original brilliance.
Find out more …
Kit Smart
http://users.ev1.net/~darkfox/KitSmart.html
Brief biography and two of the poet’s most famous — or infamous — poems.
Johnson on Christopher Smart
www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/smart.html
Kit Smart gets the good doctor’s sympathy.
Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart (Two Rivers Press, 1999) £4.
This passage from Kit Smart's eccentric Jubilate Agno brims with the prankish playfulness and sudden ferocity of one of the literary world's most famous cats, whose quick spirit becomes an embodiment of spiritual devotion.
Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
British novelist, poet and essayist
Born into a family with impeccable intellectual credentials, Aldous Huxley's plan to follow in his grandfather's footsteps and become a scientist was thwarted when, at 16, he developed serious eye problems and temporary blindness. After some improvement in his condition, he completed an English degree at Oxford and went on to become a writer.
During the years of World War I, unable to fight, he was a frequent guest at the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he mixed with many of the great literary figures of the time. In the 1920s, Huxley became friends with D H Lawrence, with whom he travelled in Europe. He later lived in Italy and France.
Huxley's early poems and witty satirical novels were followed by his most enduringly popular work, Brave New World (1932): a bleak dystopia where individual freedom has been sacrificed for a scientifically advanced, trouble-free society.
In 1937, Huxley moved to California hoping the climate would improve his eyesight, but also in search of new spiritual direction. He virtually abandoned fiction in favour of essays, screenplays — such as Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Jane Eyre (1944) — and historical studies, including The Devils of Loudon (1952), which later became the basis of Ken Russell's controversial film about sexual hysteria The Devils (1970).
In 1954, Huxley wrote an The Doors of Perception, an influential study of the effect of the drug mescaline on consciousness. This was followed two years later by Heaven and Hell, a description of his experiments with LSD.
Huxley died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the same day Kennedy was assassinated.
Find out more …
Aldous Huxley Somaweb.org
Portal site with links to all facets of Huxley’s persona.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
www.levity.com/corduroy/huxley.htm
Further Huxley material, biographies and links.
Aldous Huxley Recollected by David Dunaway (Altamira, 1998) £15.95.
Account of Huxley’s American years, including interviews with Huxley’s family and friends, his FBI files and the scripts for Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice.
Charles Bukowski 1920-94
German-American poet and novelist
Charles Bukowski was born in West Germany, but his family moved to the United States when he was still very young. His early years in Los Angeles were significant chiefly for the brutality he experienced at the hands of his father, and for the severe acne from which he suffered. Retreating into solitude, Bukowski read avidly and began to drink.
Thrown out of his parents' home at 21, he spent most of the next two decades as a hobo alcoholic, taking menial jobs wherever he could get them. After a drink-related ulcer nearly killed him, he returned to Los Angeles where he worked as a post office clerk for the next 12 years.
During this time, Bukowski's work began to be published, drawing admiration for its gritty realism describing the edges of society, and his determined literary individualism. He became briefly famous when Barbet Schroeder's film Barfly (1987) immortalised his life — he was played by Mickey Rourke — but his work has only recently been admitted into the American literary canon. He is often grouped with his contemporaries, as a poet of the Beat generation.
Find out more …
The American Museum of Beat Art
www.beatmuseum.org
Page featuring a concise biography and a bibliography of Bukowski’s works.
Post Office by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Press, 1992) £8.99.
Through his alter-ego, Bukowski gives a humorous account of the decade leading up to the start of his career as a full-time writer.
Charles Bukowski: Locked in the arms of a crazy life by Howard Sounes (Rebel Ink, 1999) £10.
Biography of the writer whose semi-autobiographical books about low-life America made him rich and famous.