Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat
An intimate biography that reads like fiction, Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat uses a famous feline literary character as a lens for viewing the life of an idiosyncratic writer and the world in which he lived. Christopher Smart was closely connected to Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding, among other figures of the middle 18th century, but he's best known for the long work Jubilate Agno, written during his confinement in an asylum due to his "religious mania." By far the most famous section of this poem is his tribute to his best companion in those years, an orange tabby named Jeoffry, the ostensible hero of Soden's book. Part of a very narrow pets-of-the-literati sub-genre that includes Nunez's Mitz and Woolf's Flush, Jeoffry establishes a connection with the reader almost as powerful as the bond between Smart and his four-footed friend. It's a delight for Anglophiles, poetry addicts, or animal lovers.
An intimate biography that reads like fiction, Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat uses a famous feline literary character as a lens for viewing the life of an idiosyncratic writer and the world in which he lived. Christopher Smart was closely connected to Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding, among other figures of the middle 18th century, but he's best known for the long work Jubilate Agno, written during his confinement in an asylum due to his "religious mania." By far the most famous section of this poem is his tribute to his best companion in those years, an orange tabby named Jeoffry, the ostensible hero of Soden's book. Part of a very narrow pets-of-the-literati sub-genre that includes Nunez's Mitz and Woolf's Flush, Jeoffry establishes a connection with the reader almost as powerful as the bond between Smart and his four-footed friend. It's a delight for Anglophiles, poetry addicts, or animal lovers.
An intimate biography that reads like fiction, Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat uses a famous feline literary character as a lens for viewing the life of an idiosyncratic writer and the world in which he lived. Christopher Smart was closely connected to Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding, among other figures of the middle 18th century, but he's best known for the long work Jubilate Agno, written during his confinement in an asylum due to his "religious mania." By far the most famous section of this poem is his tribute to his best companion in those years, an orange tabby named Jeoffry, the ostensible hero of Soden's book. Part of a very narrow pets-of-the-literati sub-genre that includes Nunez's Mitz and Woolf's Flush, Jeoffry establishes a connection with the reader almost as powerful as the bond between Smart and his four-footed friend. It's a delight for Anglophiles, poetry addicts, or animal lovers.