SWIFT, JONATHAN. - Irish writer, b.
Dublin 30 Nov. 1667, d. there 19 Oct. 1745.
Although he had received orders in the Anglican
Church, he was nevertheless opposed to all historical
forms of Christianity. In his satirical poem The Tale of
a Tub he indeed violently attacks Peter (the Catholic
Church), Martin (the Protestant), Jack (the Calvinist).
In The Battle of the Books he contributes to the famous
quarrel over the supremacy of the ancients or the mod-
erns. But his masterpiece is Gulliver’s Travels (1727), a
satire whose universal pessimism about the fate of man
and its bitter philosophy on the fundamental wickedness
of humanity might be called Leopardi-like, apart from
the lyrical gift of the Italian poet. Yet by a whim of fate
and thanks to the inventive fantasy of the author, two of
the four books that compose it, the Voyage to the Country
of the Lilliputians and the Voyage to the Country of the
Brobdingnagians, have become a classic of children’s
literature. S. is of interest for the singular acuteness of his
satire, which makes him the champion of the English
Enlightenment, for the extreme lucidity of his language,
but he repels by his virulence and ferocity, even if he never
descends to personal polemics. Another aspect of this
complex figure is represented by his sentimental corre-
spondence with Esther Johnson contained in Journal to
Stella (1710–13) and by the poem Cadenus and Vanessa
(Cadenus being an anagram for Decanus), dedicated to
another woman, written in 1713 and published after her
death in 1723. This biographical side has aroused great
interest among modern scholars of S. The great 18th-
century critic Samuel Johnson did not conceal his antipathy
toward the writer. S. died half-mad in Dublin.