Reading Swift's Poetry

This book explicates Jonathan Swift's poetry, reaffirming its prominence in competing literary traditions.

Daniel Cook (Author)

9781108840958, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 August 2020

264 pages
15 x 23.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.61 kg

Poets are makers, etymologically speaking. In practice, they are also thieves. Over a long career, from the early 1690s to the late 1730s, Jonathan Swift thrived on a creative tension between original poetry-making and the filching of familiar material from the poetic archive. The most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years, Reading Swift's Poetry offers detailed readings of dozens of major poems, as well as neglected and recently recovered pieces. This book reaffirms Swift's prominence in competing literary traditions as diverse as the pastoral and the political, the metaphysical and the satirical, and demonstrates the persistence of unlikely literary tropes across his multifaceted career. Daniel Cook also considers the audacious ways in which Swift engages with Juvenal's satires, Horace's epistles, Milton's epics, Cowley's odes, and an astonishing array of other canonical and forgotten writers.

1. Early poems
2. Moderns and ancients
3. Love and books
4. Telling tales
5. Market Hill
6. Swift's remains.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Poetry by individual poets [DCF]