SOURCE: Willson, Robert F., Jr. “A Modest Proposal: Swift's Persona as Absentee.” Ball State University Forum 17, no. 4 (autumn 1976): 3-11.

In the following essay, Willson disputes the general recognition of Swift's persona as an economic or political theorist, arguing instead that based on his puns and euphemisms, he is a decidedly antihuman figure.

It is a melancholy object to encounter the number of critics who have taken their cue concerning the identity of Swift's persona in A Modest Proposal from Louis Landa's theory about the pamphlet's economic nature. Landa has argued that the Proposal was “another protest, in Swift's unique manner, against the unqualified maxim that people are the riches of a nation” [i.e., populousness], and that it directly attacked the politico-economic language of a particular tract entitled Maxims controlled in Ireland.¹ To read the satiric work in this light, Landa maintains, is to see it as another...