Swift is one of the best-known and most highly venerated satirists in the English language. But the precise forms of his satires often seem to defy categorisation. This chapter explores how Swift used, appropriated, and invented his own satirical norms. The first section examines how he parodied form, both in his mock versions of specific genres such as pastoral and elegy, and also in his treatment of the printed book, in the parodic paratexts of A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In his mock-treatises, Swift repeatedly yokes unthinkable subjects to refined style. The second section of the chapter shows how Swift uses the same technique in the Travels to defamiliarise the world. The third and final section focuses on Swift’s verse, where his mixed forms and intertwined rhymes and rhythms provide a commentary on the crumbling world he portrays.

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Byron’s vicious early satire on the contemporary literary scene, started life as ‘British Bards’, a shorter piece of about 500 lines focussed predominantly on ‘the poetry of the present Day’.1 When Byron first tried to publish it in December 1807 his bookseller refused, on the grounds that it contained ‘if not gunpowder, at least half a dozen libels’.2 As a would-be satiric debut, ‘British Bards’ was certainly combustible and very confident. But a large part of its assurance came from the authority of the company it joined. In its approach and in some of the particulars of its critique, it sought to continue the work of a number of recent heroic couplet satires on literary subjects: Richard Mant’s The Simpliciad (1808), Lady Anne Hamilton’s Epics of the Ton (1807), and – in the previous century – William Gifford’s influential Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795) and T. J. Mathias’s Pursuits of Literature (1794–97). Each of these satires attacks a group of upstart poets who are trying to do something new: in Mant, Hamilton and Byron’s cases, the Lake Poets and various minor poets associated with their group; in Gifford’s poem a decade earlier, the Della Cruscan poets grouped around Robert Merry, Hannah Cowley and Mary Robinson; and in Mathias’s case, the Della Cruscans in company with almost anyone else who dared to lift a pen. Each satirist shoulders the responsibility of protecting and speaking for the established neoclassical tradition they see themselves as belonging to, and which they believe to be under siege.

Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England