We all know Jonathan Swift because of Gulliver's Travels, and because he has a truly great first name. Patrick Kurp, in the Quarterly Conversation, however, discusses his poetic works.
From the piece...
No, in the popular mind Swift remains a one-book author, and even ambitious readers may be unaware he wrote poetry. Scholars have identified roughly 280 poems in English and a handful in Latin. Like most of Swift’s work, nearly all were published anonymously for reasons both prudent and pathological. Even so great a critic as Samuel Johnson, in The Lives of the English Poets, devotes only two paragraphs to the poems and blandly says they are “often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety.” At least Johnson got the humorous part right.
Swift’s early verse is written in the high Pindaric manner of Abraham Cowley with occasional leavening dollops of Dryden (Swift’s second cousin). It’s formal, creaky stuff, most of it grindingly conventional, but attentive readers will enjoy passages of wild inspiration.
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