SOURCE: Johnson, Maurice. “The Structural Impact of A Modest Proposal.” Bucknell Review 7, no. 4 (May 1958): 234-40.

In the following essay, Johnson weighs the influence A Modest Proposal derives solely from its syntactical and organizational format.

A Modest Proposal (1729) has been singled out as the one incontestable example of poetic passion in English Augustan literature. Its pervasive irony, metaphorical contrasts, and paradox have been described as operating on a “grander scale than in any poem of its day.” Simultaneously, it has been studied as an early Georgian tract dealing with contemporary mercantilist attitudes toward balance of trade, economic statism, Irish absentee landlords, English policy, the impotent poor, and theories of population. A Modest Proposal is currently employed to illustrate a single department of Jonathan Swift's rhetorical art: his feigning an alien identity and situation, acting in character to achieve his satire. In the universities the present idea of Swift is...