SOURCE: Introduction to The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Pollak outlines differences between Pope and Swift in their formal responses to eighteenth-century sexual ideology, highlighting the emergence of modern cultural attitudes about gender.

… the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

I

This book investigates the differing relationships of Swift and Pope to a shared set of cultural myths about gender. It seeks to illuminate not only the dynamics of eighteenth-century sexual ideology, but also the formal manifestations of that ideology in the poems of two men writing during...