Jonathan Swift, Poet

In The Guardian, Irish poet Derek Mahon has published a fine celebration of fellow-Irishman Jonathan Swift as poet:

“Widely perceived as a sort of anti-poet and critically disregarded for two centuries as offering nothing very dense or visionary to the scholarly mind or the inquiring spirit, he has since been read anew as one of the great eccentrics; despite his aspiration to a tough-minded detachment, there is great emotion in his work, great turmoil under the hard, glittering surface. Admirers of Augustan elegance and postmodern `cool' will find him remarkably hot-headed, a flamboyant character as colourful as Wilde or Yeats…”

Mahon has Swift right, though he seems to contradict the portrait of Swift in The Lives of the English Poets, by Dr. Johnson, who also has him right:

“His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning. He pays no court to the passions; be excites neither surprise nor admiration; be always understands himself: and his reader always understands him: the peruser of Swift wants little previous knowledge; it will be sufficient that be is acquainted with common words and common things; be is neither required to mount elevations, nor to explore profundities; his passage is always on the level, along solid ground, without asperities, without obstruction."