Louise K. Barnett

Swift's Poetic Worlds

University of Delaware Press, 1982

Generally considered piecemeal or in traditional groupings according to subject matter, Swift's poetry reveals an underlying coherence when it is examined as a whole.  All of the poems enact a struggle between the power of art to provide a shaping vision of the world and the forces of chaos and entropy that challenge it.  The structure that emerges in this adversary poetry is a dynamic relationship between the effort to order--the poem's "principle of unity"--and an opposing "principle of expansion."  A definition of the adversary that is often the creation of a satiric fiction becomes the principle of unity that is expanded upon--reduced, enlarged, destroyed, redefined--through the resources of poetry.  This is the essential dialectic that Swift's Poetic Worlds explores.

In one broad category of poems, those of fictive self-portraiture, a character identifiable as Swift encounters a personal adversary in the form of a threat to the self--for example, the irresponsible gossip that a public figure attracts, the possible ridicule of social superiors, or the very different problems created by the self's relationship to Stella or Vanessa.  The poetry of the world, on the other hand, addresses the typical concerns of satire--the diverse kinds of knavery and folly.  this category may be subdivided into poems of distance and control (often mock or counterforms of traditional genres), which succeed in encompassing their satiric objective, and poems of excess, in which powerful feeling overwhelms the aesthetic design, rendering the assertion of order uncertain.  The poems of the first group notably lack emotional intensity because, whatever the subject or occasion, they remain within the verbal universe.  unlike Swift's other satiric poems, they depend upon assumptions about language and literature more than upon rules of conduct; the sins committed take place within a world of men and events.  In the second group, comprising the notorious scatological poetry and many of the political poems, satire verges on tragedy.  When Swift considers the body and the body politic, his feelings of outrage tend to overwhelm the poetic design, and the order asserted is ambiguous or tentative.

Swift's poetry moves between the extremes of achieved order and feeling unmastered by the requirements of poetic expression; it is a record of the dynamic struggle between vulnerability to a powerful adversary and the formidable resources of art.