Are great works of imaginative literature, such as Gulliver's Travels, made out of life, or are they made out of other books? In 1919, T. S. Eliot published a landmark essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” arguing that the true worth of a writer was not to be found in “those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else,” but rather that “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot's anti-romantic account minimizes originality and foregrounds hard work. Artistic achievement results from consciousness of the past, of cultural history. Literature is made of other literature, Eliot contends, more surely than it is made out of life experience. Readers of Swift might feel, perhaps should feel, that the antithesis is a false one. Nevertheless, Eliot's argument is persuasive enough to suggest that investigating the way in which a major writer modifies, and is modified by, pre-existing literary traditions, can be a valuable approach to the creative work. Our most direct source of knowledge here must derive from what Swift himself read. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will be concerned with the books that Swift read, and with his way of reading them. The second section will focus more generally on what he made of what he read.