Having thought about the great Irish prose writer
Jonathan Swift as a
"hater of
his kind" and a tortured genius, Stephen recalls something
that the English poet John Dryden said: "Cousin Swift, you will
never be a poet." He applies the saying to his own earlier
religiosity: "Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint." But
Dryden's saying holds an additional lesson for Stephen. Although
Telemachus, Proteus, and
Aelous show him brooding
on the problem of stitching resonant sounds together into lines
of poetry, he will never be a poet. His talent is for prose
fiction, and at the end of
Aeolus readers see him
turning his thoughts in that direction.
The anecdote comes from Samuel
Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81).
Johnson's biography of Swift is frequently critical (Boswell
often observes that he had an inveterate prejudice against the
Dean), and it begins with a snide glance at the question of
the writer's nationality that would have held interest for
Joyce: “He was contented to be called an Irishman by the
Irish; but would occasionally call himself an Englishman. The
question may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in
which he delighted to involve it.”
Not long after this comes the anecdote: "Swift began early to
think, or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindarick
Odes to Temple, to the King, and to the Athenian Society, a
knot of obscure men, who published a periodical pamphlet of
answers to questions, sent, or supposed to be sent, by
Letters. I have been told that Dryden, having perused these
verses, said, 'Cousin Swift you will never be a poet';
and that this denunciation was the motive of Swift’s perpetual
malevolence to Dryden."
Anthony Burgess notes that the saying could apply just as
effectively to Joyce, who had a "slender" poetic talent that
"had to be enclosed in the irony of the great prose books for
it to be effective. His verse talent is, in fact, close to
that of Swift (Dryden was, of course and as always, right),
and this is appropriate for the second man to draw great prose
out of Ireland" (ReJoyce, 80). Stephen, who styles
himself a poet but has few and slight poetic accomplishments,
does not recognize the challenge to his own literary art.
Instead, he genially mocks his youthful piety—a less
threatening failure than his poetic pretensions.
