> I wonder if Swift didn't find poetry too limiting. Menippean satire is
just
> too weird to be contained in verse. Pope's satire is well-suited to verse,
> though (I think), insofar as P's satire is reformative; wehreas I think
> Swift's was just anarchic -- and better suited, maybe therefore?, to
prose?
> (bakktin etc etc)...
Makes sense, Gabe -- and the earlier the more anarchic, with _The Battle of
the Books_ the most anarchic of all. But could it also be to do with when
Swift uses his "own" voice, and when he doesn't? Mostly (would the Examiner
essays be the exception?), in his prose he used other voices, in the poetry
mostly his own. Or is that simplistic?
(Incidentally, has anyone ever explored the relation of Marvell's _The
Rehearsal Transposed_ to Swift's prose? I think Swift somewhere mentions
Marvell's prose with admiration. Marvell seems to have been airbrushed out
as an influence -- as with his "Fleckno" leading on to Dryden).
> Even when he was dotty and slobbering he used to run all
> the stairs in his deanery for HOURS, up and down and up and down. Can you
> imagine him incontinent, drooly and sweating, pounding teh stairs, this
> violent old man. When he was a young man, he would often with no
> explanation bolt out the back door and race up the hill behind his
lodgings
> even with company present. He'd have great springs round Twickenham.
Cool!! I didn't know this.
Cheers,
Robin
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