ANDREW MARVELL (Notes)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

MARVELL, Andrew (1621-1678), son of the Revd Andrew Marvell, born at Winstead in Holderness, Yorkshire. in 1624 the family moved to Hull on his father's appointment as lecturer at Holy Trinity Church. Marvell attended Hull Grammar School. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar in De. 1633, and graduated in 1639. In 1637 he had contributed Greek and Latin verses to a Cambridge volume congratulating Charles I on the birth of a daughter. His mother died in Apr. 1638, his father remarrying in November. Around 1639 Marvell may have come under the influence of Roman Catholic proselytizers: according to one story he went to London with them and was fetched back by his father. In January 1641 his father was drowned while crossing the Humber, and soon after Marvell left Cambridge for London. Between 1643 and 1647 he travelled for four years in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, learning languages and fencing, and perhaps deliberately avoiding the Civil War (he said later that 'the Cause was too good to have been fought for'). On his return from the Continent he apparently moved in London literary circles and had friends among Royalists. His poems to Lovelace ('his Noble Friend') and on the death of Lord Hastings were published in 1649. In the early summer of 1650 he wrote 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', perhaps the greatest political poem in English.

From 1650 to 1652 Marvell tutored young Mary Fairfax, daughter of the Parliamentarian general, at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire. In this period, it is usually assumed, he wrote 'Upon Appleton House' and lyrics such as 'The Garden' and the Mower Poems. In 1653 he was appointed tutor to Cromwell's ward William Dutton, and moved to John Oxenbridge's house at Eton, where he probably wrote 'Bermudas'. In 1654 with 'The First Anniversary' (published 1655) he began his career as unofficial laureate to Cromwell, and was appointed in 1657 Latin secretary to the council of state (a post previouly occupied by his friend and sponsor John Milton, now blind). For eight months during 1656 Marvell was in Saumur with Dutton, where he was described as 'a notable English Italo-Machiavellian'. He mourned Cromwell in 'Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector' (1658) and took part in the funeral procession. The following year (January) he was elected MP for Hull, and remained one of the Hull members until his death. At the Restoration his influence secured Milton's release from prison.

From June 1662 to April 1663 Marvell was in Holland on unknown political business, and in July 1663 he travelled with the earl of Carlisle as private secretary on his embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, returning in January 1665. His satires against Clarendon were written and published in 1667. Later that year he composed his finest satire 'Last Instructions to a Painter', attacking financial and sexual corruption at court and in Parliament, and took part in the impeachment of Clarendon. The Rehearsal Transpros'd, a controversial mock-biblical prose work advocating toleration for Dissenters, which set new standards of irony and urbanity, appeared in 1672 (Pt II, 1673). Gilbert Burnet called these 'the wittiest books that have appeared in this age', and Charles II apparently read them 'over and over again'. According to the report of government spies, Marvell (under the codename 'Mr Thomas')  was during 1674 a member of a fifth column promoting Dutch interests in England, and in touch with Dutch secret agents. The second edition of Paradise Lost contained a commendatory poem by Marvell, and in his prose works he continued to wage war against arbitrary royal power. Mr Smirk, or The Divine in Mode and A Short Historical Essay Concerning General Councils (1676), and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), were all Marvell's though prudently published anonymously. The London Gazette offered a reward, in Mar. 1678, for information about the author or printer of An Account. That August, however, Marvell died in his house in Great Russell Street from medical treatment prescribed for a tertian ague. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681, printed from papers found in his rooms by his housekeeper Mary Palmer, who gave herself out to be his widow and signed the preface 'Mary Marvell' in order to get her hands on £500 which Marvell had been keeping for two bankrupt friends. This volume did not contain the satires (the authorship of some of which is still disputed): these appeared in Poems on Affairs of State (1689-97).

Famed in his day as patriot, satirist, and foe to tyranny, Marvell was virtually unknown as a lyric poet. C. Lamb started a gradual revival, but Marvell's poems were more appreciated in 19th-cent. America than in England. It was not until after the First World War, with Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and T. S. Eliot's 'Andrew Marvell', that the modern high estimation of his poetry began to prevail. In the second half of the 20th century his small body of lyrics was subjected to more exegetical effort than the work of any other metaphysical poet. His oblique and finally enigmatic way of treating what are often quite conventional materials (as in 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun' or 'To His Coy Mistress') has especially intrigued the modern mind.

Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn rev. P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (2 vols, 1971); Latin Poems, ed. and trans. W. A. McQueen and K. A. Rockwell (1964), The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. E. B. Smith (1971); P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (2nd edn, 1968); H. Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician (1978); J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry (1966).

—oOo—

From A History of English Literature, by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian (1926-1937)

The End of the Renascence, 1625-1660 — 6. Puritan poetry. Marvell.


The Puritans also had their songsters, who, while they were less numerous than those of the other party, included one of the most endearing and another, much the greatest of the poets of the century—Marvell and Milton.

It is impossible not to place among the Puritans Andrew Marvell (1621-78) (1), who, under the Commonwealth was tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax, the great Parliamentary general, and who subsequently was Milton's friend and with him secretary to the Privy Council. He was the most inspired and affectionate of Cromwell's panegyrists, and after the Restoration he carried on in verse and prose the struggle for religious and political liberty. Yet it must be recognized that no one could be less like than Marvell to the conventional harsh and gloomy Puritan, the enemy of all worldly and artistic amusement, for ever mouthing verses of the Old Testament in order to denounce the sins of the world.

This figure is dispelled as we look at Hanneman's portrait of Marvell, a man thirty-seven years old, with brilliant, living eyes, a laughing, mocking mouth and a calm brow, or as we read the verses which the poet wrote in his thirtieth year, alight, as they are, with human love and feeling for nature. Even in the poems of his maturity and in his pamphleteer's prose the gaiety is apparent of a jovial and mirth-loving  spirit. On the whole, religion has far less place in Marvell's verses than in those of the Anglicans we have just considered. While he wrote many verses which witness to the sincerity of his faith, he made both more numerous and finer poems filled with the joyous humanism and the cordial, vital quality which prove him a son of the Renascence. Undoubtedly he revered the Bible; but he also loved wine, women, and song.

He wrote his essentially poetic works at Nunappleton, Lord Fairfax's country-seat, where he lived from 1650 to 1652. He is inspired by the country, but not, like earlier poets, by the country seen in accordance with the pastoral convention. The desire for a more precise, for a local poetry, was already making itself felt, and one of the first poems which fulfilled it was John Denham's Cooper's Hill. But while a landscape was to Denham no more than the starting-point for historical and moral reflections, Marvell indulged far more fully in the happy contemplation of natural scenery. Before him only Wither had expressed, amid much rubbish, the intimate enjoyment he drew from fields and woods. Marvell spontaneously returned to this theme which was to be so dear to the Lake poets. He is very Wordsworthian in Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborough, in which he describes a sort of natural terrace whither Fairfax, after his retirement, was wont to resort in search o quiet and of a meditative mood.

Marvell relates his own feelings in the longest of his poems, Upon Appleton House, in which he shows that he is familiar with the aspects of the country and its trees and birds, and that he had studied and compared the songs of birds. He anticipates Wordsworth in preferring the song of the dove to that of the nightingale. As he walks, he can

... through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,

and watch the woodpecker at work. He almost identifies himself with the birds and growing things:

Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer;
And little now to make me wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants.

He has dialogues with the singing birds. The leaves trembling in the wind are to him Sibyl's leaves:

What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said,
I in this light mosaic read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Nature's mystic book.

To be covered with leaves is a delight to him:

Under this antic cope I move,
Like some great prelate of the grove.

He calls upon the leafy shoots to cling to him:

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines.

This is the exalted love for nature of a romantic, but a hint of strangeness and of Elizabethan pedantry are mingled with it.

Marvell's feeling for animals, his suffering when they suffer, is voiced with infinite gracefulness in his semi-mythological poem, The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn.

He was the first to sing the beauty and glory of gardens and orchards. In them he tastes his dearest delights: it seems to him that all creation is

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Marvell's Garden foreshadows Keats by its sensuousness, and Wordsworth by its optimistic and serenely meditative mood.

Yet he preferred wild to cultivated nature. It is in the spirit of charming Perdita in The Winter's Tale that, in The Mower against Gardens, he protests against artificial gardening processes—grafting, budding, and selection.

The feeling for nature which, in the poems we have mentioned, is expressed in its pure state, is readily introduced into poems which are otherwise inspired, by Christianity or by love, nowhere better than in the famous song of the emigrants in Bermuda. Here Marvell imagines that he hears a Puritan refugee from the Stuart tyranny singing praises to God as he rows along the coast of an island in the Bermudas, 'safe from the storms' and prelates' rage':

He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

Sometimes Marvell returns to the pastoral, but he gives it a new emphasis of truth, even of realism. The short idyll Ametas and Thestylis making Hay-ropes is very original and gracerul, and there is also the touching complaint of Damon the Mower, who, working beneath a burning sun, laments his Juliana's hardness of heart.

Love poems are not numerous in Marvell's work, but among several which are graceful (The Gallery) or slightly ironical—denouncing women's tricks, artifices, and coquetry (Mourning, Daphnis and Chloe)—a few hold us by their passion. His lines To his Coy Mistress have Donne's strength and passion without his obscurity or bad taste, and run easily and harmoniously. They are the masterpiece of metaphysical poetry in this genre, and they also show a return to the anacreontic theme, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' But it is repeated with a new intensity. It issues from a heart truly deep and passionate, and the love which is demanded is silent and forceful:

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

These lines are the very essence of the poetry of Marvell, that strange, sensuous, passionate Puritan. He had, however, another vein. He was an ardent patriot and patriotism rather than piety may be said to have dictated his verses on Cromwell's protectorate and death. It is the dominant note of his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland [1650], First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector (1655), and Poem upon the Death of His late Highness the Lord Protector. A sort of competition of poets, in which such as Waller and Dryden took part, was provoked by the great man's death, and Marvell carried off its prize because in his verses the man speaks through the poet. They are penetrated with emotion. Better than the others, Marvell gives the impression of the greatness of him he sang and the immensity of the loss his death occasioned.

After the Restoration Marvell pursued only the art of satire, in prose and verse, and this phrase of his accomplishment is better studied elsewhere. We have said enough to show how far he was original as a pure poet. Nature endowed him richly: his sincerity and straightness of vision sufficed to raise the metaphysical school, to which he belonged, from its state of decline, and to bring it back from extravagance to reason without alienating fancy. In the history of the feeling for nature his place is considerable. He expressed himself with liveliness and happy audacity. But he paid too little regard to versification. His lyrical work is written almost entirely in rhymed eight-syllabled couplets, a pleasant metre, but one so easy that it tempts to carelessness. In the formation of his stanzas, Marvell shows himself one of the least varied and inventive poets of his time. To rank among the greatest, he should have had a more exacting standard of art, and perhaps a more whole-hearted devotion to poetry, as well as those supreme qualities of mastery of the word and the line which are the glory of the other Puritan poet, John Milton.



 

Satire and the Satiric Spirit — 3. Political Satire: Marvell, Oldham.—

Under the Restoration the domain of political satire is vast and crowded, and only the scholar can explore all its corners. Great names, brilliant or powerful works stand out above a multitude of pamphlets and invectives, which in the most varied forms express one and the same fund of virulent enmity; where intense words fail to give any artistic relief to the monotony of these outporings of hatred.

It is the art of the satirist which alone counts here. The contemporaries, struck by the wealth of this production, have gathered from it the collections entitled Poems on Affairs of State, in which satires are intermixed with pieces of different characters, and of unequal interest. Among their very diverse themes, there are heard the outburst of a vigorous impassioned inspiration, that of a seething anger against the absolutist and Catholic tendencies of the Stuarts. All the genius of a Dryden, thrown on the side of the monarchy, cannot prevent the confused instinct of an irritated people from voicing itself in even louder tones; and another writer—Andrew Marvell—from lending a poetical expression to this instinct.

Marvell belongs to the preceding age of English literature. (1 bis [see above]). A belated survivor like Milton, he preserves in the midst of the children of Belial the forceful energy of a character that has been tempered by Puritanism. His satires, by virtue of the definite occasion which called them into existence, are part and parcel of the Restoration and must be connected with it.

This occasion brings together three poets of the transition in which the new literature develops from the old. Waller (2), a courtier poet at heart, had celebrated an English naval victory, and attributed its triumph to the reigning dynasty (Instructions to a Painter, 1665); Sir John Denham (3) had inveighed against this adulation in lines of greater manliness (Directions to a Painter, 1667, 1671, 1674). Sparing at first the king's person—for he knows how to bend the stiffness of his principles, and is not above tactics of caution—then abandoning all reserve, he [Marvell] launches until his death (1678) a series of attacks against the foreign policy of the king, and the scandals of public life of the court. Unable to disclose his identity, he has to circulate these pamphlets anonymously, either in manuscript form or in loose sheets, and to hide his main purpose under the veil of allegories. But the personality of the author reveals itself in most cases, and the pulsating ardour of his feeling shines out through all disguises ([The Last Instructions to a Painter], Britannia and Raleigh, Dialogue between Two Horses, etc.). In a language of extraordinary raciness, and a popular tone, with a raw realistic touch, the rage and shame of an England that has been humiliated, enslaved, and contaminated by foreign vices and fashions are here expressed. Such feelings were still exceptional, but their contagious influence was spreading obscurely. As if the new spirit in poetry supplied him with his instrument of expression, Marvell writes most often in heroic couplets; but his unpolished verse, capable of surprising vigour, has not the necessary suppleness or regularity and rather reminds one at times of the simple ballad rhythms. The irresistible virtue of a lofty soul, of a heart embittered but obsessed by noble regrets and high thoughts, nevertheless imbues these strange poems with an energy of movement and phrase, with an eloquence, that make them one of the most eminent examples of English political satire.


________


(1). Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Grosart, 4 vols. (1872-5); Poems and Satires, ed. Aitken in 2 vols. (1892) and in 1 vol. for the Muses' Library (1898). See A. Birrell, Andrew Marvell (English Men of Letters Series, 1905).

(1 bis). (...) Poems and Letters, ed. by H. M. Margoliouth, 1927; P. Legouis, André Marvell, etc., 1928. There would seem to be serious doubt as to the authenticity of several among the satires attributed to Marvell.

(2). Edmund Waller (1606-87): Poems, ed. by Drury, 1893. See Part I.

(3). Sir John Denham (1615-69): Poems, Chalmers, vol. vii. See Part I.

Reflections (On a Drop of Dew)

Universal Criticism: Arbuthnot and Swift (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Louis Cazamian on John Arbuthnot and Jonathan Swift. From A History of English Literature, by E. Legouis and A. Cazamian (Classicism: The Spirit of Controversy):

Controversy begets controversy; it also produces scepticism. In the atmosphere of party strife and of the clashing of ideas, the average mind is drifting towards the lassitude, the jaded indifference which will mark the mid-years of the century.

With vigorous thinkers, who give themselves up wholly to their beliefs, and ardently live through their intellectual adventures, doubt cannot be superficial and easy to bear; the universal irony with which they envelop themselves, and which seems to dissolve all the disappointments of heart or brain into a mere play of the critical intellect, disguises but ill the inward torment born of a moral restlessness. One must not, in all probability, lay too much stress on the moral kinship between Swift and the Romanticists, who were inclined to recognize in him one of themselves. But one can see in him, along with the triumph of the rational lucidity with which classicism wanted to light up the correct order of life and art, the symptom of the inner uneasiness which a reason too well armed for destruction could not escape, while it only met on every side with rival negations.

[ARBUTHNOT]

John Arbuthnot, born in Scotland (1667), taught mathematics in London, then practised medicine; attached to the person of Queen Anne (1709), he played an important part under the Whig ministry (1710-14) and in 1712 wrote numerous pamphlets: The Art of Political Lying, The History of John Bull, etc. In 1713 he formed with Pope the Scriblerus Club, which produced the Memoirs of Scriblerus (published in 1741). After the death of the queen and the fall of his party (1714), he retired into private life, but continued to collaborate in the literature of the opposition, in a way that still remains obscure. He died in 1735. His Miscellaneous Works (1750) are only partly authentic. The History of John Bull, Cassell's National Library; ed. by H. Teerink, 1925. See Aitken, The Life and Works of Arbuthnot, 1892.

Arbuthnot is inseparable from Swift. He was his friend and lived in mental companionship with him; from the circle to which both belonged there issued works united by an affinity of inspiration, and many a hint whicvh others knew how to put to profit. A supple, alert, original, seed-sowing intelligence, he has influenced Swift to a greater degree than he has been influenced by him. Or less pronounced features, but not without a certain family resemblance, he deserves to be  remembered by the side of his great friend.

It is not easy to estimate the share of Arbuthnot in the common fund of ideas, images, symbols, and pleasantry to which not only he and Swift, but also Pope, Gay, and others contributed. His John Bull recalls in several places the Tale of a Tub; on the other hand, Gulliver's Travels owes its birth to Martinus Scriblerus, a general theme, no doubt of collective origin, but the most direct development of which seems to be due to Arbuthnot. As for the echoes and variations of this theme in the literature of the day, there still subsists about them a great deal of uncertainty.

One thing is clear, and that is the frame of mind to which these diverse works give expression. Keen and critical thinkers, instinct with the intellectual craving for realities, find themselves in contact with one another, mixed up with the politics of an age when all the devices of government are laid bare, when power is transferred to parties, when opinion, oficially in the ascendant, is subjected to all the caprices aroused in it by secret manœuvring; when public life is the triumph of insincerity and fraud. Stimulated by the analysis of the deceit which social appearances serve to cloak. Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, and Gay encourage each other to the ironical search after false intellectual values. Before their tribunal are summoned wretched poets, false savants, quack doctors, pretentious scholars, humanists puffed up with bookish learning. A sort of general revision of science and art is instituted; and this universal criticism, so bold that it dares assail the superstitious obsession of ancient literatures, takes up again the charges of Hudibras against an obstinate scholasticism that will not die.

Like Butler's satire, Martinus Scriblerus exaggerates the whims, the oddities, the wrongs of pedantic ignoramuses, overlooking the soul of healthy curiosity that is often to be found in them; above all, it obstinately attacks adversaries who have been conquered time after time, and it pursued them under their already obsolete forms rather than under the new forms with which they manage to invest themselves. In this excellent fancy, there is a somewhat forced air of caricature. But the claims of intellect against foolishness are affirmed with a clear, robust, and sovereign good sense.

Arbuthnot has left his mark upon this common fund of doctrine. Through his John Bull also, his Political Lying, and the pictures of his personality that we find in the works of his friends, he possesses a distinct literary physiognomy. He has the gift of humour, transposes into impassive observation a full and concrete sense of the innumerable absurdities of life, and his sober art, vigorous, often bitter and realistic, recalls the tonality of that of Swift. A doctor, he knows the intimate connections of body and soul, and looks on the caprices of character from a physical point of view; and yet his vision of moral things is direct and profound; his portrait of John Bull has definitively drawn the first outline of this national English type. He has a creative imagination for allegory, and sustains the portraits of his symbolical characters with an accurate sense of the relationship between the sign and the thing signified. With him, experience and reflection have not soured the power of feeling, but have matured it into a humane and tolerant philosophy, the kindly radiation of which was felt by all who came near him. His rationalism is refined into a humility of the intelligence. He is a writer through the firmness, the precision, the incisiveness of his style; and his artistic invention has been fruitful. The figure of Martinus Scriblerus, ridiculous, pitiable, and obscurely appealing, and the episodes of his childhood, are additions to the unforgettable types of human comedy; Sterne remembered them in Tristram Shandy, Carlyle in Sartor Resartus.


[SWIFT]

Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin in 1667, came of a family of Yorkshire origin; lost his father at an early age, studied at Kilkenny and Trinity College, and was attached as secretary to Sir William Temple, until 1699. Already in 1696-7 he had written a great portion of A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books, published in 1704. It was at the home of Temple that he met Esther Johnson, the future Stella. He took orders, was appointed to the small living of Laracor in Ireland, but for the most part we find him in London, actively engaged in religious and political controversy. He defended the rights of the Irish clergy, and this led him to desert the Whig party for the other side, shortly before the Tory ministry of 1710. For a period of almost four years Swift, an intimate of Harley, was the influential adviser of the Government; collaborated in the Examiner (1711) and prepared public opinion for the peace with France (The Conduct of the Allies, etc.). Appointed Dean of St. Patrick's (Dublin) in 1713, he retired to Ireland on the fall of the Tories, whither he was followed by Hester Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), whom he had known in London; the false position of Swift between the two women who loved him, and of whom (it is possible, but improbable) he may have married one (Stella), was relieved by the death of Vanessa; that of Stella, in 1728, came as a still greater blow. He sympathized, meanwhile, with the sufferings of the Irish people, and wrote in their favour the Drapier's Letters (1724). Gulliver's Travels, which originated at a much earlier date, appeared in 1726, and had a great success, which, however, only brought greater suspicion upon the writer from a Government made uneasy by his satirical verve. His health, which had been failing for some time, grew worse; he was a victim of cerebral troubles and became more and more morose; after a few years of a life bordering on insanity, he died in 1745. Prose works, ed. by T. Scott, 1897-1908; Selections, ed. by Craik, 1892-3; Correspondence, ed. by Ball, 1910, etc.; A Tale of a Tub, etc., ed. by Guthkelch and Smith, 1920; The Battle of the Books, ed. by Guthkelch, 1908; Gulliver, ed. by Aitken, 1856; Craik, Life of Swift, 1882; Leslie Stephen, Swift, 1882; H. Cordelet, Swift, 1907; S. Smith, Dean Swift, 1910; R. F. Jones, The Background of the Battle of the Books, 1920; Vanessa and her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift, ed. by Freeman, 1921; Eddy, Gulliver's Travels, a Critical Study, 1923; E. Pons, Swift, la Jeunesse, le Conte du Tonneau, 1925; Carl Van Doren, Swift, 1931.

Swift is the greatest writer of the classical age by the force of his genius; the concern for art and the care of form are not in his case the essential motive of creation. His work owes an exceptionally broad scope to the freedom and penetration of its thought. He carries the rational criticism of values to a point where it menaces and impairs the very reasons for living. In his case, therefore, lucidity and the search for balance are suffused with an intellectual emotion, concentrated and intense, which at times cannot be distinguished from an impassioned bitterness, and the expression of which, despite the restraint of irony and humour, possesses a pathetic vehemence. Attaining thus to the utmost limits of satire, he leaves the normal, simple plane of a literature of reason; the stifled, repressed voices of sensibility and instinct, which reality in its baseness and cruelty afflicts with many wounds, supply the subdued accompaniment of soul-stirring chords to the clear accents of the intellect. And just as the language of Swift has this mixed tonality, so his thought goes beyond the stage of pure criticism; it finds itself at work conserving, if not constructing; it clings to the relative and provisional truths which can shelter the being of man. Beyond the spirit of classicism, of which he is the supreme mouthpiece, one perceives in Swift the latent powers of a virtual Romanticism; and further still, the audaciously humble solutions of the most modern wisdom.

It is permissible to think that these attenuations of the spirit of criticism, these voluntary sacrifices to good sense, are not the most original part of Swift's work. His practical adhesion to moral or social beliefs which his merciless perspicacity saw through and through is to all appearances a sincere act, and one which no logical need can lead us not to respect. But he has not explained the submission of his reason on principle; the lesson of his intellectual destiny is uncertain; his example, deprived of all contagious virtue, remains strictly individual and less fruitful. His life, with the shadow which overcasts it and keeps gradually thickening, is in spite of all more significant than the wholly superficial tranquillity of his mind. The moral figure of Swift is that of an eager demand for truth that destroys one by one all deceitful illusions, and of the suffering which accompanies that destruction. This demand has been carried far in all directions; further, it would seem, than it itself desired to go; further, perhaps, than it was aware of at times.

As a Church dignatary, mixed up in the controversies which separated the Anglicans from the dissenting sects, and within Anglicanism itself set several tendencies at variance with each other, Swift had to take a side. His career was a choice; he lived and died as Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin. He wrote numerous religious treatises, which one is usually too much inclined to overlook, besides doctrinal sermons, sensible and calm in tone; he acquitted himself scrupulously of the duties of his charge, and practised his religion, with more hidden regularity than apparent zeal. He recommends a judicious form of piety; extremes repel him, and his preferences lie in the observance of a golden mean; to follow the religion of the majority of one's country, is in Swift's opinion to act as a well-behaved man. He rails against the arguments of the Catholics, the strife and the fanaticism of the various sects; his nature leads him to embrace a doctrine of average reason. But he rebels with all his energy against the ambitious and rational attempt of Deism; he harshly refutes Collins. And in his reaction against the looseness of morals, he goes to the extent of extrolling, not without a suspicion of irony, the benefits accruing from a purely exterior and social submission to the attitude of belief, for hypocrisy is, after all, better than cynicism.

This is only a sudden outburst. Despite the conformity of his declarations and principles, analogous to that of a Voltaire, Swift stirred up a deep and secret unrest in the minds of those in power during his time, the patrons of Church and State; Queen Anne, above all a devout Churchwoman, refused to recognize his political services in a fitting way; the favourite of a minister, he did not obtain the bishopric he believed he could expect; at the critical moments in his life, an unkind destiny always seemed to baffle his desires; it was with the bitterness of a long series of disappointments that he withdrew from court intrigues. His great works, those in which his genius is laid bare, terrified or scandalized all orthodoxies; in A Tale of a Tub, his religious thought is instinct with a movement of pitiless negation; and the impulse which carries it on is too strong not to overthrow all the barriers which he himself would like to set up. In the preface which he wrote for this work, Swift is indignant that he should be classed among the Deists by superficial readers. To us of to-day, the error appears very natural. To point out shades and degrees of difference between the sects who contest each other's rights to represent the pure teaching of the Gospel, is to make it possible to select that which is least removed, on an average, from the sacred text; but such a choice is only a makeshift of resignations, the solution of despair; for too startling allegories picture to our eyes the unconscious or intentional work of human instinct, in all ages and in all the churches, bent on deforming, twisting, mutilating, contradicting the letter and spirit of the admirable and terrible message beneath which the flesh of man groans and faints.

And not only are religious organizations built up on half-conscious acts of cowardice, and the surrender of the highest aspirations of faith; but the very ardour which exalts the most enthusiastic of believers—the Quakers, the Ranters, and those Huguenots, refugees from France, who at this time are making a public show of their convulsions—is bound up with the turbid fermentations of animality. The Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit no doubt admits, in passing, that prophetic inspiration can be an immediate gift from the Godhead; but everything encourages the conjecture that this is a purely formal reserve; for an over-zealous spirit in religion, from the orgies of the ancients to the frenzies of the moderns, is called back with too mercilessly sharp an analysis, too keen an intuition of the deeper link between certain spiritual raptures and erotic moods, to the appetites alone of the flesh. The spirit of this treatise, under its form of concentrated irony, is that of a modern study of the pathology of mystic states. And with the taste for sound, even if bitter truth, there is mingled in it the keen and secret joy of a moral revenge, the protest of a free mind against conventional lies, even should these lies be sacred.

But the works of reason are treated with no better respect. The Battle of the Books is fired by an anger still aimed at a special object—at certain forms of intellectual ambition and error. Pedantry, false erudition, rabid controversy, are connected with the thesis of the 'moderns,' the insolent, mean enemies of the glory of the ancients; the despiser of Phalaris, Bentley—who yet was not wrong—is overwhelmed with classical contumely; the verve of this pamphlet, full as it is of allusions to the images and devices of the epic, is another example of the fecundity at this epoch of the mock-heroic theme. Gulliver's Travels singularly broadens the indictment of the very effort by which the human mind claims to know and understand. Philosophy appears in the light of an ambitious jargon; metaphysics, of a mystication; while theory, that sterile activity, shackles the efficient play of practice in all domains and in a hundred and one different ways. This satiric realism is given free scope in the painting of the illusory kingdom of Laputa. The fever of financial speculation, of rational inquiry, and already, of mechanical progress, which the society of that day freely shows, is presented as the agitated ardour of over-heated brains, in which an unceasingly hatched all manner of 'projects' and inventions, preposterous chimeras.

Swift does not seem to put any trust in science, either in its present or in its future; he derides equally the erudite interferences of Bentley, and Newton's theory of gravitation; these hypotheses, he holds, are the playthings of thought; fashion upholds them, and then they pass away. Like Samuel Butler, he joylessly witnesses, in the first flush of the modern age, the the awakening of the mental unrest which will produce the scientific conquest of the world; his attention, turned towards the past, is above all aware of the innumerable failures of scholastic charlatanry. The moderns, according to him, have added nothing which really matters to the sound reasoning added nothing which really matters to the sound reasoning of the ancients. His rational criticism of knowledge has not positive counterpart; it tends to scepticism.

It is less surprising to find only shadows in the images which Swift paints of political institutions and manners. His experience had revealed to him the hidden springs of power, the part played by corruption and intrigue. He writes on the opposition side, under the despised administration of Walpole. Elsewhere, in his didactic treatises, he shows himself alive to the necessity for a strong authority, sustained by the prestige of religion, and in its turn sustaining the spiritual hierarchy. While he has nothing about him of the uncompromising Tory, he is a friend of order. But Gulliver's Travels throws the light of a superior and destructive irony upon the smallness of the means, the vanity of the motives, the illusion of the catchwords, through which kings retain their thrones and magistrates their offices; and from one end of society to the other the fearful influence of man upon man is exercised. It is not only the English political life of his time which he thus dissects; the monarchy itself, the paraphernalia that surround it, the courts and courtiers, the debating assemblies, the struggles of parties, the wiles of the favourites of both sexes—everything upon which, in fact, rests the contemporary administration of Europe—is irremediably damaged by this corrosive satire. To serve the needs of his allegory, and in order to vary the perspective by reversing the scale of his transposition, Swift carries us from the country of the dwarfs to that of the giants; in the former, everything was the grotesque and despicable parody of that human reality which convention invests with an august prestige; in the latter, it is our reality which reveals itself, directly, as ridiculous and infinitely small. But Brobdingnag and its patriarchal manners are not an ideal seriously proposed to man; this fancy vanishes as soon as one grasps its thin texture; it is only invented to show us better our littleness, to crush us under a sense of our miseries. Whatever the standard chosen for the comparison, mankind cuts a sorry and ugly figure.

The reason is that it is in itself vile and corrupt. In order to realize ever so little the idea of a noble existence, Swift has to it that one must forsake the human species. Animal life will supply us with the figures of reasonable beings. In the land of the philosophical horses, we at last come upon something that in the countries known to us we have looked for in vain. When explained to these wise quadrupeds, our civilization is not intelligible to them; for our perversity surpasses all understanding. And in the lower depths of their civilized society, the ignoble race of two-footed monsters drags itself along; let us look at it without prejudice, and we shall recognize ourselves. What we call bestiality is the very attribute of man. With relentless cruelty, Swift drives our thought back towards the sordidness of physical existence. Here is an instinctive trend of his attention, almost an obsession of his fancy, of which his poems, like the great allegories, bear the traces, and which has been often connected with the morbid tendencies of his nature. No element in his work is more characteristic; none is better known, this delight in what is foul spreading itself out with cynical frankness on the very surface. In what measure have we here the sign and the germ of a pathological state? Or is it the need for the whole truth, a realism of mind, an ironic lesson of the moralist aimed at the vanities of mankind, a psychological and medical attention to what links up soul and body, or again the lucid, voluntary pessimism of a mind that is resolutely and cooly Christian? Nothing is more difficult than to attempt an exact answer to these questions.

On the other hand, there is among these elements one which dominates the others too much, which emanates too distinctly from all this work like a bitter essence, not to rightly serve to define it: pessimism. Swift does not pass judgment upon the universe or upon the world of man in the absolutely negative way which makes philosophic pessimism; his mind mistrusts general affirmations, and at the same time his status as a priest does not permit him, with regard to creation as a whole, to pronounce one of those explicit words of despair which faith reproves. Yet he is intellectually hostile to what exists; his emotions have a much larger share in his judgments when he condemns than when he accepts reality. His verdict on life is of the psychological and moral order. It bears upon the quality of men in themselves, and upon the use they make of the occasions to act which society offers.

It is in the souls that the evil lies; thence it is that it radiates over all the relations of human beings with one another. This pessimism is so clearly coloured by individual experience, that one has been able to see it in the generalized after-effect of the shocks felt by the sensibility, or more precisely by the ambition of Swift; it is so personal in its expression, that one is tempted to find in it the painful consciousness of an impaired psychological and mental health, the echo of inner sufferings which have ended by ruining the balance of a mind. Perhaps there is even at bottom the hidden influence of one of those secret sores of personality, the possible effects of which are revealed to-day by the study of subconscious states.

And yet, Swift has not been always the prey of this bitterness; at least, not to the same degree. His intimate life, and his literary life, both betray moments, or phases, of animation, of expansiveness, almost of gaiety. It is when he comes out of himself, out of his concentrated and solitary meditation, that his thought appears to relax. At the time in which he is wholly engrossed in political strife, from 1710 to 1714, Swift is carried onward by the tide of action. The Journal to Stella, a collection of letters in which he jots down familiarity the story of his life for the girl to whom he is attached by an affection that has remained rather mysterious, is one of the most taking documents of its kind; an effusion in which one catches the note of a strange temperament, somewhat ailing; but a not full of playfulness and tender puerilities. Whether it be the bustle of public affairs, or sentiment, which then occupies Sift more, something is lifting him above that fund of aggressive reflection to which A Tale of a Tub already bore witness.

Ireland also saved him at moments from this gnawing disquietude of mind. Deeply moved by the miserable lot of the country which saw his birth, which he does not look upon as his own, and for which he evinces a somewhat scornful sympathy, he at least knows how to speak out in its favour. He advises the Irish (1720) to reply to the economic pressure of the English by refusing to buy the products of their manufacture. In 1724, he publishes a series of Letters (signed 'M. B. Drapier') against the new copper currency which an Englishman had obtained the privilege of coining, and the weight of which did not correspond with its official value. With an admirable divination of the popular mind, he there wrote a language full of such simple and just sense, and roused so cleverly the mistrust of the practical instinct, that the Government had perforce to yield before a general protest. On this occasion, Swift was the accepted mouthpiece of a people; and he always remained proud of it.

In many subjects, his fertile talent as a polemist was able to expose with clearness and coolness the ideas of a lively and original but balanced judgment. There is in Swift a literary critic, a political writer, a theorist of the rights of the Church. But his work has a physiognomy as a whole; and it is right that its dominant traits should be furnished by the most marked characteristics of his genius. He is above all great by his allegorical invention as applied to satire, by his humour and irony, by the marvellous ease and precision of his style.

Irony and allegory are here fused into one. What is unique, is the suggestive power which radiates from the play of symbolical imagination; and more than in the symbols themselves, more than in the forms chosen to illustrate the theses, the interest here lies in the discovery of these forms, in the act of the mind which chooses them, which loads them with a meaning prodigiously rich and insulting. The apologues on which are founded A Tale of a Tub or The Battle of the Books have nothing original about them. Gulliver's Travels is first of all a novel of adventure and a tale of wonder, and as such is of no more value than many others; the sources utilized by Swift have been discovered or are suspected; in this domain he had a long series of predecessors. But the working out of these data is with him incomparable. The verve, the ingenuity, the concrete invention, which embroider these general themes with uninterrupted variations, give to the least detail a restrained and irresistible eloquence, and store it with a world of allusions; which also render the supernatural acceptable and normal; such are the elements of an art which Swift carries to the highest degree. And these elements themselves are derived: their common source is a passionate analysis which, with an indefatigable effort, scrutinizes reality, at the same time as it judges and condemns it with a harsh and angry feeling. The figured representations among which Swift's satire moves are like an embittered poetry, the value of which lies less in its form than in the philosophic meaning through which it develops and achieves itself.

An art of implicit expression, contained as to its methods, expansive as to its results, is by its main device closely akin to humour. It has usually been the custom to treat Swift as a master of irony, because his mockery has not the kindly aftertaste which would appear to be, according to some judges, the distinctive note of the humorist. But while his effects are very often more in the nature of irony—which depicts the ideal, and pretends to believe that it is real—they are also very often enlivened by humour—which depicts the real, and pretends to believe that it is ideal. The working of transposition, which is common to them, brings these two literary kinds very close together, and their boundaries are shifting. Swift likes to hover playfully over these limits, and to pass from one domain to the other. He is no less a master in one than in the other. He handles humour in a superior manner because being keenly alive to all the virtual value of the concrete, to all the reactions which the real sets up in our emotion or in our intelligence, he knows how to evoke it in all its crude force, to allow these reactions their widest play, and to efface himself entirely behind the the facts he presents to us, enhancing their eloquence with his impassibility. The best-known piece—the practical commercial proposal to utilize the flesh of Irish children as butcher's meat—has all the precision of an estimate and the calm of a financial statement.

Thus it is that Swift's style conveys the impression of a tense energy, but one which commands and directs itself. A morbid element may have been found in his thought; his personality is a problem which has not as yet, perhaps, revealed the whole of its secret; it certainly contains both grief and instability, a deep trouble which finally led to madness. But this anguish and this unrest are dominated by the force of an extraordinarily lucid intellect, of a will that knows how to govern passion even when it delivers itself up to it. Upon a temperament that possessed all the germs of moral incertitude, and which no doubt, in the following century, would have blossomed out into an ardent Romanticism, Swift builds up a work that is wholly classical in its form. The inner tension reveals itself only in the compactness of the expression, in the number of the intentions, in the restrained violence of some effects. Everything is clear in this style, despite the use made of allusion; it is bathed in an intellectual light; everything in it seems sound, normal, self-controlled. It is only in some familiar effusions, such as the Journal to Stella, that we meet with the signs of an oddity in the manner of writing and in the terms which is excessive, at time disquieting.

Everywhere else, the language is that of reason itself, of a reason that is sensible to reality, nurtured by it, and in no way abstract and dry. Swift possesses the concrete world, knows how to utilizae it, and here again he is the humorist. He knows how to employ the racy word, sometimes the coarse word; he frankly collides with the proprieties, or, as the case may be, veils the realism of his subjects with ironic periphrases. But the concrete facts of experience, as well as the ideas, the sentiments, and the shades of meaning, are enveloped, harmonized by the limpid flow of the most simple, vigorous and straightforward prose. Each word in its place, quite naturally; the most fitting word is always chosen, withoug effort, through an instinct that seems spontaneous. A great variety of tone is obtained by means of a supple adaptation of the language to the theme. If one remembers the extent of Swift's work, the ease with which it passes from the most naïve exposition to the pseudo-epic style, from the weightiest discussion to the freest pleasantry, the fact that the parts of his correspondence which were the most hastily dashed out are still astonishingly spirited and immediately, inevitably clear, one will the better gauge the greatness of the writer.


To be consulted: Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ix. Chaps. IV, V, VIII, IX, XIII; vol. x. Chap. XV; Bergson, Le Rire,  etc., 1900; W. H. Durham, Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-25, 1915; Elton, The Augustan Ages, 1899; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 1862; Hunt, Religious Thought in England, 1892; F. B. Kaye, ed. of Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1924; Laski, Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham, 1921; Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 1812-15; Paston, Lady Mary Wortly Montagu and her Times, 1907; Pons, Swift, la Jeunesse, le Conte du Tonneau, 1925; De Rémusat, L'Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, 1856; Rigault, History of Free Thought, 1906; Saintsbury, History of Criticism, 1906; Sichel, Bolingbroke and his Times, 1902; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1902.

Swift

Jonathan Swift (Oxford Companion)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.


SWIFT, Jonathan (1667-1745), born in Dublin after his father's death. He was son of Jonathan Swift by Abigail (Erick) of Leicester, and grandson of Thomas Swift, the well-known Royalist vicar of Goodrich, descended from a Yorkshire family. He was a cousin of *Dryden. He was educated with *Congreve, at Kilkenny Grammar School, then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was censured for offences against discipline, obtaining his degree only by 'special grace'. He was admitted (1689) to the household of Sir William *Temple, and there acted as secretary. He was sent by Temple to William III to convince him of the necessity of triennial parliaments, but his mission was not successful. He wrote Pindaric *odes, one of which, printed in the Athenian Mercury (1692) provoked, according to Dr *Johnson, Dryden's remark, 'Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' Chafing at his position of dependence, and indignant at Temple's delay in getting him preferment, he returned to Ireland, was ordained (1694), and received the small prebend of Kilroot. He returned to Temple at Moor Park in 1696, where he edited Temple's correspondence, and in 1697 wrote *The Battle of the Books, which was published in 1704 together with *A Tale of a Tub, his celebrated satire on 'corruptions in religion and learning.' At Moor Park he first met Esther Johnson ('Stella'), the daughter of a servant or companion of Temple's sister. On the death of Temple in 1699, Swift went again to Ireland, where he was given a prebend in St Patrick's, Dublin, and the living of Laracor. He wrote his Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, with reference to the impeachment of the Whig lords, in 1701. In the course of numerous visits to London he became acquainted with *Addison, *Steele, Congreve, and Halifax. He was entrusted in 1707 with a mission to obtain the grant of Queen Anne's Bounty for Ireland, and in 1708 began a series of pamphlets on church questions with his ironical Argument against Abolishing Christianity, followed in the same year by his Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test, an attack on the Irish Presbyterians which injured him with the Whigs. Amid these serious occupations, he diverted himself with the series of squibs upon the astrologer John Partridge (1708-9, see under BICKERSTAFF), which have become famous, and his 'Description of a City Shower' and 'Description of the Morning', poems depicting scenes of London life, which were published in the *Tatler (1709). Disgusted at the Whig alliance with Dissent, he went over to the Tories in 1710, joined the Brothers' Club, attacked the Whig ministers in the *Examiner, which he edited, and in 1711 wrote The Conduct of the Allies and Some Remarks on the Barrier Treaty, pamphlets written to dispose the mind of the nation to peace. He became dean of St Patrick's in 1713. He had already begun his Journal to Stella, a series of intimate letters (1710-13) to Esther Johnson and her companion Rebecca Dingley, who had moved to Ireland in 1700/1; it is written partly in baby language, and gives a vivid account of Swift's daily life in London where he was in close touch with Tory ministers. Swift's relations with Estella remain obscure; they were intimate and affectionate, and some form of marriage may have taken place. Another woman, Esther Vanhomrigh (pro. "Vannumery") , entered his life in 1708; his poem *Cadenus and Vanessa suggests that she fell deeply in love with him ('She wished her Tutor were her lover') and that he gave her some encouragement. She is said to have died of shock in 1723 after his final rupture with her, inspired by her jealousy of Stella. Stella died in 1728.

Swift wrote various political pamphlets, notably The Importance of the Guardian Considered (1713) and The Public Spirit of the Whigs (1714), in reply to Steele's Crisis; and about the time of the queen's death in 1714 and the fall of the Tory ministry, several papers (published much later) in defence of the latter. In the same year he joined *Pope, *Arbuthnot, *Gay, and others in the celebrated *Scriblerus Club. He returned to Ireland in Aug. 1714 and occupied himself with Irish affairs, being led by his resentment of the policy of the Whigs to acquire a sense of their unfair treatment of Ireland. By his famous *Drapier's Letters (1724) he prevented the introduction of 'Wood's Half Pence' into Ireland. He came to England in 1726, visited Pope and Gay, and dined with Sir Robert *Walpole, to whom he addressed a letter of remonstrance on Irish affairs with no result. He published *Gulliver's Travels in the same year, and paid a last visit to England in 1727, when the death of George I created for a moment hopes of dislodging Walpole. He wrote some of his most famous tracts and characteristic poems during his last years in Ireland, The Grand Question Debated (1729); Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1731, pub. 1739), in which with mingled pathos and humour he reviews his life and work; A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious *Conversation (1738); and the ironical Directions to Servants (written about 1731 and published after his death). He kept up his correspondence with *Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, attracted to himself a small circle of friends, and was adored by the people. He spent a third of his income on charities, and saved another third to found St. Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles (opened 1757). The symptoms of the illness from which he suffered for most of his life (now thought to have been Ménière's disease) became very marked in his last years, and his faculties decayed to such a degree that many considered him insane, though modern biographical opinion rejects this view. He was buried by the side of Stella, in St. Patrick's, Dublin, his own famous epitaph 'ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit' (where fierce indignation cannot further tear apart the heart) being inscribed into his tomb. Nearly all his works were published anonymously, and for only one, Gulliver's Travels, did he receive any payment (£200). Dr Johnson, *Macaulay, and *Thackeray, among many other writers, were alienated by his ferocity and coarseness, and his works tended to be undervalued in the later 18th-19th centuries. The 20th century has seen a revival of biographical and critical interest, stressing on the whole Swift's sanity, vigour, and satirical inventiveness rather than his alleged misanthropy.

 

 

 

 

 

(ADVANCED LEVEL:)

Swift published a great number of works. Besides the more important, referred to above, mention may be made of the following:

Political writings: The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod (1710), an attack on Godolphin; The W—ds—r Prophecy (1711), attacking the duchess of Somerset; A Short Character of T[homas] E[arl] of W[harton] (1711)); The Fable of Midas (1711); Some Advice Humbly Offered to the Members of the October club, the extreme Tories (1712); Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs (1714); Traulus (1730), attacking Lord Allen; and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen [Anne] (1758), which contains his famous character of *Harley.

Pamphlets relating to Ireland: A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720); The Swearer's-Bank (1720), The Story of the Injured Lady (?1746); A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728); *A Modest Proposal (1729); An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions and Enormities in the City of Dublin (1732); The Legion Club (the Irish Parliament, 1736).

Pamphlets on church questions. The Sentiments of a Church of England Man with Respect to Religion and Government (1708); A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709); A Preface to the B—p of S—r—m's Introduction (1713), an attack on Bishop *Burnet; Mr C—ns's Discourse on Free Thinking, a satire on Anthony *Collins (1713); A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders (1721), Swift's Sermons (of which four were published in 1744), are marked by the author's usual characteristics of vigour and common sense.

Miscellaneous verses and other writings. 'Mrs Frances Harris's petition', a servant who has lost her purse, an amusing burlesque (1709); *Baucis and Philemon (1709); 'On Mrs Biddy Floyd' (1709); 'A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick' (1710); A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712); Imitations of the Seventh Epistle of the First Book of *Horace and the First Ode of the Second Book of Horace (1738); A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet (1721); a 'Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage' (1727); the 'Journal of a Dublin Lady' (1729); The Lady's Dressing-Room (1732); The Beasts Confession to the Priest (1732), a satire on 'the universal folly of mankind in mistaking their talents'; A Serious and Useful Scheme to Make an Hospital for Incurables—whether the incurable disease were knavery, folly, lying, or, infidelity (1733); On Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733), satirical advice to a poet; A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed; and Strephon and Chloe (1734).

The Prose Works have been edited by Herbert Davis (16 vols, 1939-74); Journal to Stella by H. Williams (2 vols, 1948); Poems by H. Williams (1937); Correspondence by H. Williams (5 vols, 1963-5); Complete Poems ed. P. Rogers (Penguin, 1983), with an important commentary. See also Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (3 vols, 1962-83) and a useful short study by R. Quintana, Swift: An Introduction (1955).

Universal Criticism: Arbuthnot and Swift

Dr Kat and the Earl of Rochester (NIVEL AVANZADO)

An introduction to the Earl of Rochester, with some additional poems:

 

NIVEL AVANZADO: Jonathan Swift

An introduction to Swift's A Modest Proposal (audio—In Our Time): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00h3650



Louis Cazamian: Universal Criticism: Arbuthnot and Swift.

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Una conferencia de Leopold Damrosch sobre la vida y mundo de Swift.





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La curiosa anécdota de Swift y las lunas marcianas.


Había una edición en red del Journal to Stella, convertido en blog—una forma bastante adecuada. Pero desapareció. Ahora tenemos el texto en Project Gutenberg.
 

Y aquí una (mala) edición en red de Gulliver's Travels en Project Gutenberg—uno de esos sitios web a los que hay que volver continuamente en esta carrera.

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La Academia de Proyectistas—una sátira

 

 

 

 

Y una analogía:


The Machine Stops y The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of (1647-80), lyric poet, satirist, and a leading member of the group of 'court wits' surrounding Charles II. He was born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, his father was a Cavalier hero and his mother a deeply religious woman related to many prominent Puritans. In his early teens he was sent to Wadham College, Oxford, the home of the *Royal Society, and then went on a European tour, returning to the court late in 1664. At the age of 18 he romantically abducted the sought-after heiress Elizabeth Malet in a coach-and-six. Despite the resistance of her family, and after a delay of 18 months (during which Rochester fought with conspicuous gallantry in the war against the Dutch), she married him. Subsequently his time was divided between periods of domesticity with Elizabeth at his mother's home in the country (the couple had four children), and fashionable life in London with, among several mistresses, the brilliant actress Elizabeth *Barry, and his riotous male friends, who included the earl of Dorset (C. *Sackville) and the duke of *Buckingham. Wherever he was staying he tried to keep up the other side of his life through letters, many of which survive.

Although Dr. *Johnson dismissed Rochester's lyrics, their wit and emotional complexity give him some claim to be considered one of the last important *Metaphysical poets of the 17th cent., and he was one of the first of the *Augustans, with his social and literary verse satires. He wrote scurrilous lampoons—some of them impromptu—dramatic prologues and epilogues, 'imitations' and translations of classical authors, and several other brilliant poems which are hard to categorize, such as his tough self-dramatization 'The Maimed Debauchee' and the grimly funny 'Upon Nothing'. He wrote more frankly about sex than anyone in English before the 20th cent., and is one of the most witty poets in the language. Although his output was small (he died young), it was very varied. *Marvell admired him, *Dryden, *Swift, and *Pope were all influenced by him (he was Dryden's patron for a time), and he has made an impression on many subsequent poets—*Goethe and *Tennyson, for example, and in modern Britain, *Empson and P. *Porter.
Rochester is famous for having, in Johnson's words, 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness'. He became very ill in his early thirties and engaged in discussions and correspondence with a number of theologians, particularly the deist Charles Blount and the rising Anglican churchman G. *Burnet, an outspoken royal chaplain who superintended and subsequently wrote up the poet's deathbed conversion. It was the final contradiction in a personality whose many oppositions—often elegantly or comically half-concealed—produced an important body of poems. See Complete Poems, ed. D. M. Vieth (1968); Poems, ed. K. Walker (1984); Letters, ed. J. Treglown (1980). There is a life by V. de Sola Pinto (1953, 2nd ed. 1964); see also Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974) by G. *Greene.

The Libertine

—oOo—