Tall water iii: Sodden and besotted in playland

    researching the superlatives

    redundantly invoked by the

    President in his own praise

    of his every public appear-

    once can flood more than one

    senior thesis with an entire

    Baedeker of misattribution,

    as Swift's "A Tale of a Tub"

    rising into its own on the

    swollen tide of narcissistic

    illiteracy; but what can ex-

    plain our time's account of

    his rhetoric as post-modern,

    except the drought of wit -

      

Jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
1704
Kathleen Williams
  editor
J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1975©

Leo Damrosch
Jonathan Swift
  His Life and his World
Yale University Press, 2013©