The Canon and Chronology of Swift's Poems

FAIN: FB-54286-09

James Woolley
Lafayette College (Easton, PA 18042-7625)

For the several hundred poems attributed to the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), this project seeks to relate them to their personal, social, and political occasions and, partly by dating these occasions, to date the poems themselves. A tightly related goal is to say which of the poems are probably by Swift. Dating a poem very often increases or decreases the likelihood that Swift would have, or even could have, written it. The resulting new and chronologically ordered canon of Swift's poems is a stage in the preparation of a full new scholarly edition and annotation, usable by both the general reader and the specialist. This edition, to be published by Cambridge University Press, will help to reshape our understanding of Swift as a poet: what he knew, what he cared about, what he wrote, and how he wrote. This revised understanding is likely, in turn, to be embodied in new general studies of Swift that anthologists, teachers, and students at every level will use.