SOURCE: Pollak, Ellen. “Premium Swift: Dorothy Parker's Iron Mask of Femininity.” In Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, edited by Donald C. Mell, pp. 203-21. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Pollak traces the influence of Jonathan Swift on Parker's review essay “The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light.”

To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste.

—H. L. Mencken

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

—George Santayana

It is true that Mrs. Parker's epigrams sound like the Hotel Algonquin and not like the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses of the eighteenth century. But I believe that, if we admire, as it is...