The Blistering Satire Of Jonathan Swift (Tom Ashbrook, On Point)

Jonathan Swift could wield satire like maybe no one else in the history of the English language.  He put Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians in “Gulliver’s Travels” and sent up the mean, absurd smallness of so much human nature.  He put the bones of children in stewpots in “A Modest Proposal” and skewered human immorality.  That essay, nearly 300 years old, still hurts to read today.  Still cuts.  “I hate and detest the animal called man,” Swift wrote.  And what made him?  This hour On Point:  a new biography shares the life and times and view of Jonathan Swift. / Tom Ashbrook

Interview: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/03/20/jonathan-swift-leo-damrosch-satire