Swift claimed, late in life, to have been ‘only a Man of Rhimes, and that upon Trifles, never having written serious Couplets in my Life, yet never without a moral View’. There are many subtexts to this statement, one of which is that he was a prolific poet, almost as prolific as his friend Pope, whose ‘serious Couplets’ he admired but thought himself unfitted for. Swift bowed before the mastery of Pope in the higher discursive styles, content perhaps with his own standing as the greatest prose author of his time. But his autobiographical poems show that he thought of himself, and was thought of by others, as a poet. Swift wrote almost as much verse as Pope, if we exclude Pope’s Homer translation, and he has always been admired (and sometimes preferred to Pope) by poets, including Byron, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Mahon and Ted Hughes. Swift’s regard for the couplet which Pope perfected and which became the dominant mode of serious poetic expression in his day, was as genuine as his reluctance to use it himself.

‘Only a Man of Rhimes’ is Swift’s acknowledgment of the supremacy of ‘serious Couplets’ and of Pope. It may also be seen as a refusal to compete. The hegemony Pope exercised over poetic standards, though Swift was happy to accept it, cannot be said to have determined his choices. Well before he knew Pope or Pope was known as a poet, Swift had developed his comic tetrameter style with such poems as ‘Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book’ (1698), and ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (1709). His poetic career began with a handful of odes in the wedding-cake stanzas of which Cowley’s ‘Pindariques’ were the famous English example, and one or two poems wholly or mostly in ‘serious Couplets’, in honour of Congreve and Swift’s patron Sir William Temple. A possibly apocryphal story that Dryden told Swift ‘Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet’ (or a ‘Pindaric poet’, versions differ) may be responsible, as Samuel Johnson reported, for Swift’s hatred of Dryden, and perhaps also, if true, for his almost total retreat from high styles throughout the rest of his writing career.