Late Style and Exile in Jonathan Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

Abstract

This paper investigates Edward Said‟s notion of late style and its implications along with the concept of exile as they implicitly and explicitly operate in Jonathan Swift‟s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1739) In addition, the paper examine show late style and exile function as two transformative states that maintain Swift‟s secular humanist intellectual stance and praxis to be unresolved and un-reconciled. Drawing on Said‟s notion of late style and its multiple implications, this paper proposes that Swift‟s Verses functions as an aesthetic form of lateness. More concretely, this paper is intended to shed more light on Verses as an aesthetic and political form of intellectual intransigence and non-reconciliation. Moreover, it presumes that despite the unfinished multiple interpretations directed by critics to such a poem, it has been overlooked as a late work whose difficulty and unresolved contradiction function under the heading of late style. As un-reconciled satirist, Swift continues his longstanding moral resistance and political activism against all forms of tyranny and oppression practiced by the Whigs and all other unjust forces. As such, Swift‟s non-reconciliation and radicalism is rendered throughout Verses by using a vivid dynamic power of irony and satire that function as two aesthetic gestures of late style. It goes without saying that Swift‟s intellectual resistance is inextricably bound up with universal humanist principles of justice, truth and freedom.