‘Christopher Smart’s Systema Naturae: Anti-Newtonianism and the Categorical Impulse in Jubilate Agno’

This article explores Christopher Smart's poetic emphasis on reading the world correctly in the face of contemporary religious and empirical anxieties about the incapacity of human ideas to frame the natural world and the inadequacy of language to describe, name and categorise it. Tracing a development from religious restraint to a new kind of botany, the article concentrates on four themes: the inability to express the divine and the risk of vanity in science in the poet's early work, Smart's rejection of scientific language, and his categorical impulse in Jubilate Agno, which orders his natural subjects into a new physico‐theology.