Swift as Poet

182 KENNETH] . WAGNER composed formal power and buil t on repetitive figures skilfully varied, to images of 'The shortAliv'd Vanity of Humankind.' The Court Ee/ogs, with their account of these images, 'Tawdry Splendour,' 'successfull craft,' and 'unrewarded Merit,' are an appropriate part of this later view. Swift as Poet KENNETH ]. WAGNER Nora Crow Jaffe. The Poet Swift Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1977. x, 190. $10.00 John Irwin Fischer. On Swift'S Poetry Gainesville: F1a 1978. 207. $10.00 A number of book-length studies of Swift's poetry have recently been promised to an eager and growing body of readers. Two have so far appeared, and, if they afford any glimpse of the future, topics for critical discussion are not likely to be soon exhausted. These two books could hardly be more dissimilar in tone, in fonnat, or in their assumptions about Swift and his verse. Though both are unpedantic - neither is burdened (or blessed) with a thorough scholarly apparatus - both are ambitious, seeking measures of unity in poems notorious for their variety. John Irwin Fischer discusses a modest number of poems, both major and minor. His book, the second to appear, is the more challenging, and its failures the more intriguing. For him Swift's poems are not artifacts for amusement or contemplation, nor are they mere instruments of persuasion. They 'achieve the status of mental and spiritual events' in which Swift tries 'to temper his hubristic imagination with a standard of judgment larger than himself.' Fischer can thus reiterate with unsettling frequency, and through a long chapter, that Swift's early odes are miserable productions - 'badly written,' full of 'flat mendacity,' 'distracting , silly, or downright perverse' - without seeming to belie his interest in them. The ode to Congreve is disparaged because Swift'represses the truth ofhis own heart'; the ode on Temple's illness and recovery is praised because 'Swift says ... what he really feels.' What interests Fischer, then, is not artfulness but sincerity, and his study is organized by a concept of Swift not as practising poet but as personality in conflict. Method dictates results, and what the reader gets is often fanciful psychobiography instead of critical analysis. By looking at the poems only to see through them into the mental life of their author, Fischer circumvents the question of whether, and to what degree, the poems both early and late merit critical attention on aesthetic grounds. Bathos is what you get when you throw out the baby but keep the water. Furthermore, Fischer is determined to find high seriousness everywhere in the SWIFr AS POET 183 poems, and this quest persistently denies the importance of the comic elements which hold them together and make them appealing. The notion that Mrs. Harris's Petition expresses 'a tiny theodicy' seems almost tenable until we find it based on wilfully dourmisreadings of details (when Mary steals Frances's garters it hardly means that Frances herself is 'contemplating suicide'). An exhumed bottle of wine which supplies Swift with the poetic 'inspiration' needed to finish verses for Stella's birthday becomes, in Fischer's view, 'a very type of death and rebirth' on which subtle religious meanings hinge; there is no mention of Butler's similar, and purely burlesque, source of inspiration in Hudilnos. Taken together, Fischer's emphasis on Swift's personality and on the moral seriousness of his verse make his study read like drama criticism. Swift is seen as the protagonist of a tragedy and his poems as imaginative projections or bits of d ialogue that reveal his problems and character. Fischer confirms such an impression by repeated reference to Swift's 'hubris' and attempts to 'dramatize' inner states. One may, as I do, readily take exception to such a method; yet it often renders provocative results. For one thing, Fischer's ear is carefully tuned for catching biblical resonances , and this is a valuable asset. When read in light of Genesis and Milton, A Description of a City Shower is transformed into 'Pisgah-like tableaux of London : and, although the poem's Virgilian contexts are unnecessarily belittled to make the point, the perspective is illuminating. One wishes Fischer's brief parting...