Quote of the Day (Jonathan Swift, on Satire)

“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”—Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), The Battle of the Books (1704)

Today marks the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift.  Contrary to recent rumor, the term “Swiftian” does not apply to a certain pop songstress who rakes ex-beaus over the coals for their sins, but instead to this novelist and pamphleteer and his style of satire exhibited in Gulliver’s Travels (mistakenly marketed for years as a children’s book) and “A Modest Proposal”: caustic, bitter, featuring an unreliable narrator, and ferocious toward what a later writer in this tradition, the American Mark Twain, once called “the damned human race.”