Reveller at life's feast

Hazlitt described Swift's poems as 'slipshod, tedious and trifling', but nowhere is the chaotic reality of his era so potently captured. Derek Mahon salutes a critically neglected but popular Irish poet
Jonathan Swift
Photograph: Getty

If the facts are recalcitrant, what of the legend? Even now a myth persists about Swift's "madness", as if no sane person could take such a dim view of human nature. Which means that even now he is relevant - perhaps especially now, when so many features of the Age of Reason are again discernible, not to say obtrusive: strident economic "growth", a mechanistic model of the universe, a constant expectation of imminent "chaos".

The madness rumour started in his lifetime and achieved specious authority at the hands of later writers who deplored his alleged misanthropy - a term he himself used to mean "philosophical pessimism". It's now recognissed that Swift's problems were physiological in origin. The madness theory has been discredited, yet its spectral residue may have contributed to an interesting recent development, the rediscovery of Swift the poet.

Widely perceived as a sort of anti-poet and critically disregarded for two centuries as offering nothing very dense or visionary to the scholarly mind or the inquiring spirit, he has since been read anew as one of the great eccentrics; despite his aspiration to a tough-minded detachment, there is great emotion in his work, great turmoil under the hard, glittering surface. Admirers of Augustan elegance and postmodern "cool" will find him remarkably hot-headed, a flamboyant character as colourful as Wilde or Yeats; indeed the personality goes far towards explaining the continuing fascination of his verse, which, unlike the prose satires, presented a recurrent means of dramatic self-projection. The enigmatic persona thus created, austere yet kindly - that of the "Dean", the "Drapier", "Dr Swift" - spoke with a distinctive Anglo-Irish voice, liberal, witty and vertiginously ironical, whose echo is still audible.

The complete poems run to several hundred pages. The bulk of the verse was written in Ireland after his appointment to the deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, in 1713, at 46 - though often with an English readership in mind. We are to picture a solitary though gregarious middle-aged bachelor of medium height, notable for piercing blue eyes and a formidable asperity of manner, alternately jocular and despondent, who passes his leisure hours with a circle of devoted admirers, male and female; who walks and rides a great deal; and who spends too much time alone, morosely contemplating the Hanoverian succession, the triumph of Whiggery and his own exile from the ministerial ambience where he once shone. Dublin is his native city and he has mixed feelings about it. There are two principal women in his life, Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh. The former, "Stella", is a neighbour and frequent visitor, one of his inner circle, indeed his oldest friend; the latter, "Vanessa", 20 years his junior, lives 12 miles from town. Good girl, bad girl - though Vanessa, of course, was a good girl too. Edgily aware of each other, these women provide the emotional stimulus and consolation in a seemingly sardonic, and often splenetic, existence.

Swift's directness and clarity of image and colloquial vigour have given rise to a situation where, seemingly yielding little to analysis, he suffers, or perhaps enjoys, critical neglect - but knows, like Burns, popular immortality, especially in Ireland. Traces of his mystique are scattered throughout the culture. Nor is this attributable solely to Gulliver. There is a folk memory of the generously seditious Drapier's Letters; but it's remembered, above all, that he made provision in his will for a lunatic asylum which, established in due course as the prestigious St Patrick's Hospital, continues to thrive.

All his verse is in the strict sense occasional - in his own perhaps disingenuous words, "trifles never intended for publick view". Like Byron later, he wrote not as an artist but as a gentleman amateur, or so he liked to imply. The poems, technically simple but rhetorically complex, owe much of their effect to the known character of the author and his contemporary celebrity.

Owing perhaps to their genial tone, none of the poems was more popular in his lifetime than the pair of "Descriptions" with which this selection opens. Appearing first in the Tatler in 1709 and 1710 respectively, the "Morning" and the "Shower" established this Irish provincial as a poet of London, a thing of great importance to him then and later. As a poet he was slow to find his own distinctive voice, but the "Shower" was an immediate hit: "the best thing I ever writ; there never was such a shower since Danaë's". Parodically derived from all previous literary floods - Genesis, Ovid - and sharing the social alertness of Pope and Gay (it was Swift who first suggested the idea of The Beggar's Opera), the "Shower" overflows with a love of London and a love of life.

At this stage he went with the flow of the age, a time of rapid population growth and expanding newspaper readership - an inflationary age, like ours, of financial speculation, sophisticated philistinism and harsh comedy, when Hobbes's version of the "selfish gene" promoted a culture of winners and losers. These mock-pastoral genre pieces, like most of Swift, are best read with an eye to historical context, especially visual context. Brisk Susan and the Beau in his sedan chair, clothes and objects, the furniture of room and thoroughfare, create a theatrical space that has become almost the substantive content of the verse. Like Hogarth he is a narrative painter of the period, rich in material fact and vivid detail; he has inscribed, engraved even, aspects of early 18th-century experience indelibly on memory, and not only the more scab-rous and grotesque. His genuine interest in life below stairs, for example, is in the same spirit as Hogarth's later group portrait of his own domestic servants.

"Cadenus and Vanessa", the title echoing Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis", its length and ingenuity testifying to the vitality of this relationship, was first drafted about 1713, shortly before his Dublin appointment. Inhabiting a theatrical space of the period, the erotic school-room, it's a closet Restoration comedy of manners, mistaken motives and sexual innuendo owing much to his fellow Dublin graduates Congreve and Farquhar (also to Molière), its manipulative showmanship barely concealed by the baroque machinery. There was scandal on its unauthorised publication; a certain caddishness was deplored.

"So bright a nymph to come unsought", the ingénue Vanessa, like Stella herself, was the talk of the town; the story fairly crackles with sexuality. Vanessa followed him to Ireland against his wishes, endured isolation and neg-lect, died young, and left her property not to Swift but to Swift's friend, the philosopher George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, whom she hardly knew.

Stella, whose tutor he had been in the early days at Moor Park, Surrey, first appeared under that name (borrowed from Sidney) in the birthday poems he wrote for her in Ireland, starting when she was 38 and he 46. It was Swift's opinion that modern love was a fraud based on unrealities at once grandiose and sordid, whereas he and Stella had achieved a complex, unillusioned relation founded on intimacy of mind as much as body. The warmth and realism, fresh insight and startling candour of these extraordinary love poems make them unique for their time.

Not too much need be made of the scatological poems, few in number, written in the period of disorientation following Stella's death; they might even be ascribed, paradoxically, to the good influence of her living presence, now withdrawn. Celia and Corinna are the unfortunate whipping-girls of Swifts bereavement and despair; the rage is cosmic, the sadism a kind of blasphemy. Their misfortunes must be balanced not only by the Stella poems but by Swift's more characteristic relishing of the physical, and his benign influence on the circle of strong-minded, witty women, poets among them, who were a constant presence in his Dublin life: Mary Barber, Constantia Grierson, Laetitia Pilkington. There's a certain breezy, play-acting misogyny sometimes but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he takes women seriously, and the complexity of his attitude merely reflects the actual complexity of real-life gender relations.

The Anglo-Ireland to which he returned in 1714, after the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories, was a rackety place. Swift inhabited a social and linguistic ghetto: beyond the English "pale", and even within it, lay the alternative, indeed the "native Irish" culture, largely invisible to the urban eye; though Dublin was a bilingual city, with Irish-speaking poets in residence. Swift would have known little Irish, but something of the Gaelic spirit got through to him.

His gift to Irish writers (to speak only of Ireland) has been immense. With him the principal themes are in place: "race" and religion, cabin and Big House, famine and genocide, internal exile, sexual inhibition, the language question, and a complicated attitude towards the imperial neighbour. Representations of the body in Joyce and Beckett owe much to him, as does the "savage indignation" of Yeats and Kavanagh.

Despite his audacity and hauteur, reputation mattered greatly to him; and his best-known poem, "Verses on the Death of Dr Swift", written in the 1730s during his 60s and intended for posthumous publication, was a bid to pre-empt and control how he would be seen by posterity. Aside from its biographical interest we can now see that the distinction of the poem lies in its remarkable technique, its pro-active grasp and embodiment of gossip and transience: Swift's voice is only one among many, albeit one aiming for the last word. Swift's is a Rabelaisian and a Brechtian world, a thieves' kitchen, a site of vice and predation embracing pickpockets and politicians, Gin Lane and St James. His nausea, vertigo and "excremental vision", synecdoche of the body politic, compare with those of Baudelaire, yet he has something Baudelaire lacks, a vernacular zest; far from being a misanthrope in the usual sense, he revelled in life's feast. Street cries, music to his ears till he grew deaf, echo throughout. He had a ludic taste for popular forms and idioms; indeed, the only noticeable "development" in technique, once he gets into his stride, is the adoption of an increasingly racy, conversational style often incorporating "Irish" rhymes and turns of phrase. Folk-song he preferred to Italian opera, street ballads to Handel and Purcell (parodied in "A Cantata"). At his best, he is a light, fast, indeed swift poet, again like Byron, riding helter-skelter a current of kinetic energy with streamlined fluency. The virtuosity is extraordinary - though, strangely, the magical or visionary vein is reserved for the science fiction and invisible cities of Gulliver.

No one, said Hazlitt, had written "so many lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in fact, only shew his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself". The poems seem to offer themselves as provisional drafts rather than finished compositions. Often we are dealing with a joint project, as with Stella who "collected" and perhaps co-wrote some of the poems, or with one part of a co-operative venture involving Delany, Sheridan or Anne Acheson. How we read him now depends very largely on our own response to a singular personality and the enduring psychodrama he so graphically projects.

&middot This is an edited extract from Derek Mahon's introduction to a new selection of Swift's poetry, Poet to Poet: Jonathan Swift, published by Faber.