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Jonathan Swift |
Born in Dublin, Jonathan Swift went to work for a London politician, producing the sharply comic pamphlets that won a small but influential following. By 1710, as the chief political writer for those who wanted greater freedom for Irish Catholics, he was made Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. He said he hated the Irish (as James Joyce did) but in the years that followed he created the satires and political tracts that made him one of the country’s great patriots.
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) was a hit, and with A Modest Proposal (1729) he became a national hero. He suffered a stroke in 1742, and in his last years the most eloquent example of an eloquent race lived in a kind of silent madness, forced to listen endlessly to his friends, but unable to say anything himself.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |