ABSTRACT
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), satirist, poet, and political pamphleteer, was distantly related to Dryden. He ‘began early to think, or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindarick Odes. … 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’ (Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 1905, ed. G. B. Hill, iii. 7–8).
