¹ Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1964). p. 156. Voigt deals fully with the Freudian critics; it is unnecessary to repeat his references here. Of this school, only Norman O. Brown's Life against Death (Middle-town: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959) has any genuine interest for the student of literature. Brown takes some of his fellow Freudians to task, he is sympathetic to Swift, and he pays close attention to the scatological poems, his readings of which sometimes resemble the interpretations of recent literary critics. But his ideas are ultimately vitiated by his heavy reliance on psychological jargon and by his determination to fit Swift into the scheme of his highly tendentious work, whose purpose is suggested by the subtitle: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. For him the integrity of Swift's scatological poems, their nuances, subtleties, and varieties, scarcely counts; they are important primarily as they anticipate “Freudian theorems about anality, about sublimation, and about the universal neurosis of mankind” (p. 186).

² Most readily available in: Davis, Jonathan Swift: Essays on His Satire and Other Studies (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964); and Fair Liberty Was All His Cry: A Tercentenary Tribute to Jonathan Swift, ed. A Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin's, 1967).

³ See Davis, “A Modest Defence of ‘The Lady's Dressing Room,’ ” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 41–48; Davis, “The Poetry of Jonathan Swift,” College English, 2 (Nov. 1940), 112; Davis, Stella: A Gentlewoman of the Eighteenth Century, The Alexander Lectures at the Univ. of Toronto, 1942 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 27–29; Davis, “Swift's View of Poetry,” in Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, pp. 80, 92–95; Kathleen Williams, “ ‘Animal Rationis Capax.’ A Study of Certain Aspects of Swift's Imagery,” English Literary History, 21 (1954), rpt. in Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, pp. 132–34; Williams. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1958), pp. 148, 151–52; Nigel Dennis, Jonathan Swift: A Short Character, Masters of World Literature Series, gen. ed. Louis Kronen-berger (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 56–57; Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Eng.: Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 210–11, 214; Irvin Ehrenpreis, The Personality of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 36–43; Donald Greene, “On Swift's ‘Scatological’ Poems,” Sewanee Review, 75 (1967), 676–78, 682, 685–86; Brian Vickers' introd. to his ed. of The World of Jonathan Swift: Essays for the Tercentenary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), p. 16; Maurice Johnson, The Sin of Wit : Jonathan Swift as a Poet (Syracuse : Syracuse Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 93–95, 112, 114–15, 120–21; Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1966), p. 172; Robert W. Uphaus, “Swift's Poetry: The Making of Meaning,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5 (1972), 581 ; and Jae Num Lee, Swift and Scatological Satire (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1971), esp. pp. 82–91.

⁴ “Jonathan Swift: The Poetry of ‘Reaction,‘” in The World of Jonathan Swift, pp. 207, 209. See also Austin Clarke, “The Poetry of Swift,” in Jonathan Swift 1667–1967: A Dublin Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Roger McHugh and Philip Edwards (Dublin : Dolmen, 1967), pp. 96, 113, who speaks, but without elaboration, of the comedy of the scatological poems and of Swift's enjoyment of it.

⁵ See also Vickers, The World of Jonathan Swift, who says that “Swift made the great mistake of being witty” in the scatological poems (p. 16).

⁶ For two examples among many, see Roger Bull, trans., Grobianus: Or, the Compleat Booby, by Friedrich Dedekind (London: T. Cooper, 1739) and The Gentleman's Study in Answer to the Lady's Dressing-Room (n.d.; rpt. Dublin, n.p., 1732).

⁷ The Personality of Jonathan Swift, pp. 36, 42.

⁸ These 5 poems are of course not Swift's only scatological verses. But they are among the most frequently mentioned—and censured. This essay does not attempt to assess all the scatological poems. I omit The Progress of Beauty (1719), for instance, because I can add nothing of significance to the remarks of other critics; and, except to satisfy a mania for completeness, there would be little point in citing every incidental or casual occurrence of scatology in Swift's verse.

In a satiric spectrum, the 5 poems under discussion here probably lie between The Legion Club (1736) and the riddle on the posteriors (The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon, 1958, in, 917–18; all quotations from Swift's poems are from this edition and most citations will hereafter be made in the text). In the former, scatology is pressed into the service of a fiercely satirical purpose; the latter is little more than a joke. In the 5 scatological poems here considered, satire and comedy coexist, though in varying quantities and degrees of cogency.

⁹ Humbert Wolfe, Notes on English Verse Satire (New York: Harcourt, 1929), pp. 87–88.

¹⁰ C. J. Rawson, “The Character of Swift's Satire,” in Focus: Swift (London: Sphere Books, 1971), p. 54. Although Rawson's comic example, from A Tale of a Tub, concerns Jack's flying up and kicking the beam in reaction to Martin, the source of the comedy he perceives is much the same as in the disassembly in A Beautiful Young Nymph.

¹¹ Robert Hunting, Jonathan Swift (New York: Twayne, 1967), sees not contrast but similarity between the two women : “Pope's Belinda is of a higher social level, but morally she is on a par with Corinna of Swift's poem” (p. 76). This seems excessively hard on Belinda.

¹² Cf. A Beautiful Young Nymph, 11. 13, 16, 40–53, 64, and The Rape of the Lock, Canto i, 11. 128–38, Canto iii, 11. 105–10, in Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Tillotson, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, and New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962); see also Tillotson's note, p. 402.

¹³ The quoted phrase is from Murray Krieger, The Classic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity in Modern Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 265. I agree for the most part with Krieger's sensitive reading of the poem, but I believe he errs in concluding that Corinna's humanity “leaves hope for us all—for us who, from our unalterably disorderly place in the cosmos, must recollect our scattered parts, gathering up ourselves again to face every morn” (p. 265). If we respect Corinna, it is because she is unlike us, because we realize that in her circumstances we would perish.

John M. Aden, “Corinna and the Sterner Muse of Swift,” English Language Notes, 4 (Sept. 1966), 23–31, uses a variant of Swift's saeva indignatio—“fierce sympathy” (p. 28)—to characterize the impact of the poem. This is as apt as Krieger's phrase if sufficient stress is placed on the adjective; but Aden's essay, though on the whole excellent, concentrates too much on the equilibrium achieved in the poem between the comic or grotesque and the pathetic. As my analysis tries to suggest, one's ultimate sentiment toward Corinna is more than a balance between opposing emotions.

Too late for my work to benefit from, another thoughtful essay by Aden on Swift's scatological poems came to my attention: “Those Gaudy Tulips: Swift's ‘Unprintables,‘” in Quick Springs of Sense, ed. Larry S. Champion (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1974), pp. 15–32.

¹⁴ James Beattie, “An Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition,” in Essays (1776; rpt. New York: Garland, 1971), p. 618.

¹⁵ A. B. England, “World without Order: Some Thoughts on the Poetry of Swift,” Essays in Criticism, 16 (Jan. 1966), 33, notes the compulsiveness, but not its comic side.

¹⁶ “The Sense of Regain: A Theory of Comedy,” University of Kansas City Review ( 1940), rpt. in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), p. 448. The italics are Watts's.

¹⁷ These are most dense in Swift's second paragraph. Chloe's admirers engage in ogling, wear wigs and sword knots, send billets-doux, carry clouded canes (11. 34–35, 37–38). Cf. The Rape, ed. Tillotson, Canto iii, 1. 18; Canto i, 11. 101, 118, 138; Canto iv, 1. 124. Further, Chloe's chamberpot, likened to her in 11. 173–74, may be a burlesque counterpart of the frequently mentioned china jar symbolic of Belinda. Ex cept for the chamberpot, the images above would of course have been commonplace in 18th-century descriptions of upper-class society, but they may be extensive enough here to indicate Swift's deliberate echoing of Pope.

¹⁸ “Gulliver and the Gentle Reader,” in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 61.

¹⁹ Oddly, though “burn it blue” in Swift's context clearly refers to farting, I could find no correlative meaning in any dictionary of slang. The OED, citing this line under “burn,” hesitantly (with a question mark) defines the phrase as “to act outrageously.” C. J. Rawson has suggested to me that the meaning may be explained by the popular notion that if one applies flame to a fart, it will burn blue.

²⁰ See Susanne K. Langer, from Feeling and Form (New York : Scribners, 1953), rpt. in Theories of Comedy, ed. Lauter, p. 503; Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), “Editor's Foreword” (pp. [xiii]-xiv) and p. 23.

“My Spectre around Me Night and Day,” The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City : Doubleday, 1965), p. 468.

²² Ronald Paulson states a similar idea in “Swift, Stella, and Permanence,” ELH, 27 (1960), 310.

²³ “Gay, Swift, and the Nymphs of Drury Lane,” Essays in Criticism, 23 (Jan. 1973), 15–16. Rees cites these associations in Shirley, Marvell, Cowley, and Pope.

²⁴ Jonathan Swift : A Critical Introduction, p. 212.