Swift's Juvenilia: On Reading Jacques Barzun's Introduction To Gulliver's Travels And Several Remote Passages Near The End Of The Text Itself

Saturday 15 December 2012

On Reading Jacques Barzun's Introduction To Gulliver's Travels And Several Remote Passages Near The End Of The Text Itself

ON READING JACQUES BARZUN’S INTRODUCTION TO GULLIVER’S TRAVELS AND SEVERAL REMOTE PASSAGES NEAR THE END OF THE TEXT ITSELF

I have been a Greater man than I have ever seen,

sometimes, as my mind and spirit go Grand,

still in remembrance of sickened sepulchral times of sin

when I sat sick and only waited for my time to end.

Now I enlarge, as all the world stretches out

against my tread and cannot know that I but tremor and wish

to give as its edge twists with grand lent hands.

But then I fear my own size and length spans –

is it lies? It must be for no one knows.

And so are all the world’s Souls lost

as our Greatness only goes.

St-Lambert, circa 1984.

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Introduction

I am a published poet, university teacher, critic, and editor/publisher of poetry. Welcome. Although I have had eight full collections published, since 1999, and numerous pamphlets and chapbooks published since 1990, little of my juvenilia is widely available to the reading public (as of yet).

However, between 1981 and 1986, I wrote hundreds of poems, while living on the South Shore, across from Montreal, in the city of St-Lambert, Quebec, on Putney Avenue. At this time I attended Chambly County High School; and then Marianopolis College. While few if any of these poems written before my 20th birthday seemed right for my early collections, at the time, in retrospect, there seems no good reason to suppress them now, especially as many feature similar themes and styles to my later work, though in general they are more directly in thrall to the styles of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Auden, and Dylan Thomas, than my later work. However, as these poets have always been some of my key inspirers (along with Shakespeare, Donne, Swinburne, Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, WC Williams, Wallace Stevens, and FT Prince), it seemed no harm was being done by publishing them online.

It may be that in time I produce a book of these. I make no claims for their inferiority or indeed superiority, when compared to my mature work. In some ways, I love these early poems more; in 1987, after travelling to Belfast, my work changed - it became public, and gained a wider sense of the contemporary.

Since Withers, hundreds of years ago, poets have been compiling their juvenilia, and publishing it, perhaps most famously, Byron's Fugitive Pieces.

A note on these versions: I have made few if any revisions, though silently correcting typos or grammatical anomalies that no longer seem to make sense to me; as well as any diction that is glaringly off - though the idea is to present, in the main, the poetry as it was when first typed up in what were my "final" versions; most of these poems went through between five and ten drafts. The drafts I am using here were the ones meant to be sent out to editors of magazines (I began having work published seriously in recognised journals in my late teens). I have also tended to allow each line to commence with a lower case letter unless it begins a new "sentence" or seems required by the form of the poem.

All poems copyright Todd Swift, 2012. No reprinting or reuse of these poems is permitted without express written permission of the author.