"A tedious accumulation of nothing": Christopher Smart, Imperialist Archives, and Mechanical Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract:This paper reads Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno as a “stuplime” forerunner to experimental poetry, arguing that theories and problems surrounding the avant-garde can help us situate the text as operating somewhere between an archive and a poem. I argue that Jubilate Agno, like many twenty-first-century experimental poems, is an archival project, and Smart’s mechanical ciphers, citations, translations, wordplay, and repetition are formal choices deployed to transcribe natural histories and encyclopedias. This mechanical ciphering strains a reader’s ability to attend to the literal information that Smart transcribes, foregrounding instead the labor of transcription and the idea of information. In other words, Jubilate Agno splits the difference between serving as a useful database and providing an information overload. As I argue, the formal and critical challenges posed by this poem-archive illustrate how eighteenth-century poetic experimentation was predicated on the existence of imperial archives and how this history continues to shape the poetic function of information and mechanism in contemporary poetry. Underlying this analysis is the problem of whether or how eighteenth-century studies can better inhabit its archives and texts—how do we acknowledge history without developing an acquisitive relation to violence, without making violence a commodity within the academy? Rather than answering that question, this essay will consider how Smart’s formal choices, read through an avant-garde approach to information, confront us with it.