John Barton Wolgamot could easily be mistaken for a fellow patient of Christopher Smart’s. in fact — at least according to Robert Ashley — he was the manager of the Little Carnegie in the 1970s and lived in a hotel on Broadway and 104th Street — apparently, another one of my neighbors. Wolgamot had self-published In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women in 1944. It begins:

In its very truly great manners of Ludwig van Beethoven very heroically the very cruelly ancestral death of Sara Powell Haardt had very ironically come amongst his very really grand men and women to Rafael Sabatini, George Ade, Margaret Storm Jameson, Ford Madox Hueffer, Jean-Jacques Bernard, Louis Bromfield, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Helen Brown Norden very titanically.

and continues on — one sentence per page, for 128 pages — until we read:

In its very truly great manners of Ludwig van Beethoven very heroically the very distinguishably Second Coming of Jesus Christ had very ironically come amongst his very really grand men and women to Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Franz Liszt, Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge II, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Madison Julius Cawein, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Edgar Evertson Saltus, André Paul Guillaume Gide, John Van Alstyn Weaver, Richard Henry Stoddard, Walter Dumaux Edmonds, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Augustus Boyd, Émile Gaboriau, Felix Salten, Marcel Proust, Diego María Rivera and Gertrude Allain Mary McBrady very titanically.

In 1973 Ashley and Paul DeMarinis composed a setting of the piece for voice, Moog Synthesizer and control electronics. That piece can be heard online, thanks to UbuWeb.