The Poetry of Jonathan Swift

The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, in the Focus On series, responds to contemporary trends in Swift scholarship by arguing for the centrality of Swift's prodigious poetic output to an understanding of his life and works. Arguing for a recognition of the inter-relationships that exist between Swift's poetry and prose, this new study examines the question of how Swift's works have been able to speak so powerfully both in their own time and throughout subsequent ages. Contending that paradox is fundamental to an understanding of the poet's often disturbing work, the study suggests that this paradox can be viewed as having arisen both from intellectual and aesthetic contexts, and from Swift's biographical circumstances and the troubled times in which he lived. Providing both an overview of established critical positions and sketching various new lines of critical enquiry, the study includes detailed, original readings of the much-discussed poems of London life, the characteristically idiosyncratic love poetry found in the 'Stella's Birthday' poems, the controversial 'scatological' poems, and the tour-de-force of multivalent irony found in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.

About the author:

Stephen Van-Hagen is the editor of The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection by James Woodhouse (Gloucester: The Cyder Press, 2005) and has published articles on Woodhouse, Stephen Duck and washing-day poems of the eighteenth century.'

'He is the author of The Poetry of Mary Leapor in the Greenwich Exchange Focus On series, and his poetry has appeared in Anon, Great Works, Nth Position and Erbacce. He is Programme Leader for English Literature at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, UK, where he is a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics Research Group.

86  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-57-6