To judge from some simple quantitative data, several of Swift's poems that were favourites in the eighteenth century are not among our top picks today; and several of the poems we now consider of great interest were not originally very popular. This disparity opens the possibility of deliberately studying, and deliberately teaching, a canon of Swift's popular poems to see what the eighteenth-century preferences might tell us.
Woolley, J. (2013) "Swift's most popular poems" In K. Juhas, H. J. Real, and S. Simon (Eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (pp. 367-82). Munich: Wilhelm Fink,