Word: swiftness
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...JONATHAN SWIFT by Nigel Dennis. 160 pages. Macmillan...
...Jonathan Swift is the Lucifer of British letters. Unfortunately, posterity has precautiously trimmed the old devil's toenails. As traditionally abridged, Gulliver's Travels is a charming classic for children. Yet Gulliver unexpurgated is no tale for tender ears; it is a ferocious assault on the human species. And Swift unsweetened is no nursery rhymester; he is the most powerful ironist since Aristophanes, the blackest of all the great blackguards who have lacerated the conscience of mankind...
Fearful Contradictions. Like Moses from the mountain, Swift came raging out of the peat bogs to cry doom and damnation on the idolatrous race of men. He is God's angry man, a prophet of the wrath to come who screams with infernal glee as he opens the vials of vituperation on the heads of humankind. His passions are scoriae, his imagination a holocaust. His wit is an indentured imp that leaps to any bidding-it can tickle the funny bone, attack with acid, fry living flesh on a deadpan, reach down the throat of a corpse and come...
Good and evil, God and Devil battled in Swift's life as they did in his work. He was a madman as well as a genius, and his existence was a contest of fear ful contradictions. He was a compulsive sadist with a tender heart, a lifelong impotent passionately involved with women, an earnest clergyman obsessed with excrement, a magnificent intellectual addicted to childish puns, a great master of letters who considered his life a failure because he failed in politics, an Irish national hero who loathed the land of his birth...
...Swift's sickness and his satire are examined simultaneously in this slender but consummate volume by Britain's Nigel Dennis. Himself a satirist (Cards of Identity) of no mean attainment, Author Dennis has an acute affinity for his subject. More clearly than any of Swift's latter-day biographers, he looks into the works as into a window on the man, and arranges the facts of his life to explain the state of his soul...