Swift's Poetic Worlds by Louise K. Barnett (review)

Book Reviews Louise K. Barnett. Swift's Poetic Worlds. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981. 225p. Another book on the poetry of Jonathan Swift! The last five years have seen Nora Crowe Jaffe's The Poet Swift, a Derrida-oriented approach; John Irwin Fisher's On Swift's Poetry, a fifties-style close reading; PeterJ. Schakel's The Poetry of Jonathan Swift, a consideration of the allusions in the poems; and A.B. England's Energy and Order in the Poetry ofSwift, an analysis ofthe purposeful breakdown of form in the major works. Although thesameness ofthe titlesshould stand as a caveat to anyone who would try to say something new about Swift's verse, Louise K. Barnett is undaunted as she offers yet another reading. The satisfying thing is that Barnett does manage to say a great deal that is new, even while using a number of the shopworn devices of the New Criticism. Although her rhetoric is too often loaded down with the old jargon of "the language of paradox," and although some of her paragraphs read like selections out of Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, what makes her interpretations moderately refreshing is her refusal to go along with the tired convention of grouping the poet's works by mere chronology, which we have labored under since early twentiethcentury studies by F. Erlington Ball and Maurice Johnson. Moreover, the anti-chronological approach of Barnett allows her to juxtapose writings that appear in all phases of Swift's ample poetic career, with the result that we attain a sufficiently complex and extended view of the troubled persona that speaks to us from the earliest Pindarics to the late and downward gloom of"TheDay of Judgement" (1732-33). The fruitful result of this method is that when we come to a central piece like "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," we gain the double advantage of an intrinsic, shrewd, line-by-line analysis and an extrinsic insistence on keeping the poem strictly in the context of the poet's total development as an artist. It is somewhat ofan achievement, this New-Criticky technique which completely avoids the New Criticism's dilemma of holding the poem in a vacuum by itself as though nothing else existed. Having established the several identities of the deep persona that speaks throughout the canon, Barnett is able to move on to the second phase ofher treatise, which is an explanation of the relationships among the "several" Jonathan Swifts of the poetry and the partially fictionalized world which surrounds these shifting identities. The effort here is to isolate the ways in which the persona functions to bring several types of order to the world — often a hostile one — into which the poet has been so rudely forced. One of his methods of ordering things is to approach the chaos of experience with a similar poetic chaos, which of course is the product of irony. When the poet is successful, his irony can snap the disorder ofthe world into a new kind of order which transcends the old night. In this process the chaotic world, through Swift's irony, unwittingly becomes an accomplice in the very act of ordering itself. However, Barnett is careful to emphasize that there were some chimeras that Swift could not subdue, and that even his best efforts at ordering his social environment through his verse could not always successfully grapple with his profound sense of being an outsider and his persistent inkling that the world was in some ways a dungeon in which a person's cell-mate might be the Giant Ingratitude. For this reviewer, the best part ofBarnett's book is her readingof "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," in which she steadily maintains a true sense of the poem's dolorous sophistication and the busy play of ironies which color and complicate the Swiftian persona in so many ways. Especially shrewd are her remarks on the poet's "mixing of the recognizably true and false" (p. 87) and on his deployment of the "transparent mask" (p. 88). 266ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW If there is any difficulty with Barnett's method it is that her fascination with the voice...