Smart’s Professors: Birdsong and Rhetorical Agency in Jubilate Agno

Christopher Smart’s long religious poemJubilate Agno(1758–1763) has had a curious sort of cultural impact since it was first published in 1939.¹ Although not (yet) a canonical work, Smart’s poem has exerted considerable influence on a host of modern composers and poets, from Benjamin Britten and Allen Ginsberg to Anne Sexton and Wendy Cope.² It has also earned significant critical and scholarly scrutiny.³ But it is in the emerging fields of animal and posthumanist studies that Jubilate Agno , which has animals and their voices at its heart, has become required reading. Smart’s poem pairs named individuals with