Writings of Jonathan Swift

Rating:
Summary: Just One "But"
Review: Except for the end of the book, which is clotted up with the Norton Critical Editions usual stinky baggage of festering academic critiques--except for this, the book's a fine one.

There are unquestionably people who won't appreciate Swift's style (check out the customer comments for Gulliver's Travels); but there will also be people who don't appreciate good food, good drink and healthy exercise--all you can do is leave them to their folly and continue apace.

No English language writer has ever matched Swift's chainsaw tongue. His misanthropic rage, vented in Gulliver's Travels, hacks away at the tender, maggoty, easily severed parts of pretense and hypocritical morality.

Nor does Swift anywhere ask for quarter, as he gives none. Those who don't like his reading are free to continue in their superficiality or their ignorance, and his definition of satire--a looking glass in which people see every face but their own--remains the definitive statement of the art.

Swift's lessons on writing are also direct and easy to grasp: write simply. His acid wit eats through everything it touches: academia, politics, literature, modernism...it's a bitter pill, especially if you are one of the few who sees your own face in the mirror.

The collection of Swift's poems are needless; his poetic skills were forgettable. The inclusion of Tale of a Tub, and the Battel of the Books, as well as his major essays, definitely makes this edition worth buying.