During Rochester’s lifetime, his lyrics, songs, lampoons, and satires were circulated in manuscript copies among the court of Charles II. A few of his writings were printed as broadsides or in miscellanies; his great “A Satire Against Mankind” was printed as a folio broadside in 1675. The textual issue of whether a reliable contemporary edition of his poetry exists is a complicated one. In the late summer of 1680, a book professing to be thePoems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable the E. of R. was published under the ostensible imprint of a nonexistent Antwerp printer. In an effort to capitalize on his name and popular reputation as a wild courtier, sixty-one poems were offered, of which many were pornographic and more than a third were not even written by Rochester. Nevertheless, the book was extremely popular and numerous editions were produced to satisfy public demand. In his book Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s “Poems” of 1680 (1963), Vieth explains that the earliest of these editions was based on a responsible manuscript miscellany copy text, and that despite the shortcomings of Poems on Several Occasions, it is the most important edition of Rochester published prior to the twentieth century. Since 1926, many editors have struggled with the Rochester text. The difficulties arose over an unusually problematical canon, the varying authority of texts from which the poems came down to readers, and the obscene nature of some of the genuine poems. In 1968, the definitive critical edition was published: Vieth’s The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. In solving the aforementioned difficulties, Vieth found seventy-five authentic poems, eight other poems possibly written by Rochester, and nearly two hundred spurious poems.

“A Song: My dear Mistress has a heart”

Rochester’s poems fall into four chronological categories: prentice work (1665-1671), early maturity (1672-1673), tragic maturity (1674-1675), and disillusionment and death (1676-1680). Representative of Rochester’s prentice work is the early poem “A Song: My dear Mistress has a heart” (exact date unknown), a self-consciously conventional poem incorporating characteristics of the courtly love tradition. As in many of his other songs, Rochester explores the complexities of human sexual nature while entertaining rather than instructing the reader. In two eight-line stanzas of ballad measures, the poet employs the familiar figures and concepts of Restoration lyrics—the enslaving mistress whose “resistless Art” has captured the poet’s heart. While recognizing “her Constancy’s weak,” he is powerless to escape her “Killing pleasures and Wounding Blisses” and must only trust that this poem will convince her of his deepest regard. Without varying from the sophisticated pattern, Rochester writes a tender, graceful love lyric. What seems missing is the poet’s individual voice, which would bring this artificial form to life with the sheer intensity of his wit.

“Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay”

Another early poem, “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” (exact date unknown), marks him as an authentic poetic voice with its sudden, often brutal, wit that shocks the reader, demanding his notice. Rochester’s Chloris is not the conventional dreaming shepherdess of the pastoral; she is a swineherdess of the most lustful and crude sort. Surrounded by her murmuring pigs while she sleeps, Chloris dreams of a “love-convicted swain” who calls her to a cave to rescue a trapped pig, only to throw himself lustfully upon her. Instead of a self-abasing lover pleading with his mistress, Rochester reverses the persona as Chloris finds herself the object of a crude rape. The poem’s final stanza undercuts the brutality yet retains the indecency, as Chloris wakes, realizing that it was only a dream. Her innocence is preserved, although she has enjoyed the secret pleasure of a fantasy lover. While maintaining a humorous and playful tone, Rochester adds a final unexpected twist of eroticism which lifts this song above the conventionality of the earlier one. Such a mocking tone foreshadows the poems of his mature period; the “innocent” Chloris becomes the voracious Corinna of “A Ramble in St. James’s Park.”

“A Ramble in St. James’s Park”

The poems of 1672-1673, the period of Rochester’s early maturity, reveal his accomplishment as a lyricist and his virtuosity as a satirist. Vieth believes that the satires of 1674 display the zenith of Rochester’s achievement, but “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” is a triumph. The poem is a comprehensive Juvenalian satire on sexual relations in the beau monde, displaying the speaker as one who ridicules the corruption in himself and in his fellow revelers. The speaker describes an after-dinner walk in the park in search of love. In the park, once a place of elegance and now a scene of dissipation, he unexpectedly “beheld Corinna pass,” who is his mistress and should acknowledge him, but instead “proud disdain she cast on me.” Watching further, he sees her leave in a coach with three “confounded asses.” Bitterly disillusioned, not by her lust but by her passive and treacherous submission to fools, he curses her for a “fall to so much infamy.” The speaker, who had considered himself morally superior to his companions, now concludes with an ironic self-satire, an attack on the pastoral for idealizing such settings, and a lampoon against indiscriminate lust.

The villain is not the libertine speaker but Corinna, who offends all humanity by engaging in sex unfeelingly. Honest lustful passion remains a justifiable principle, while unfeeling sex with affected fools is a far worse sin than mere lust. Rochester shows his displeasure with Restoration men and women who respond to unnatural longings and reject those desires born of natural reason. The material is vigorous and often violent in tone, impatient with the sham of Cavalier and Restoration conventions in love poetry. The best of Rochester’s bawdy satires, it is motivated not by its profane qualities but in part by a prejudice against the debasement of sex.

Tragic maturity

In the period of his tragic maturity, Rochester found his vehicle as a poetic stylist by controlling the heroic couplet for formal verse satire. The influence of the Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal provided some impetus for Rochester; his best model, however, was Horace’s disciple, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, the first major seventeenth century satirist to attempt a re-creation of classical forms. “Timon” and “A Satire Against Mankind” transcend Boileau with their economy of phrase, skillful use of narrative and descriptive styles from one victim’s portrait to another, and the command displayed between the realization of the speaker and the various dramatic scenes. John Harold Wilson, in The Court Wits of the Restoration (1948), argues that Rochester was roused in the 1670’s “to a true misanthropy by the contrast between man’s promise and his performance . . . he made war on mankind at large.” In these poems, the complacency of humankind provokes an outrage unmatched at any other point in his career.

“Timon”

“Timon” has as its principal speaker a man named Timon, who resembles Rochester in character, interests, and social status. The reference to William Shakespeare’s misanthropic Timon of Athens is obvious, although the name may also allude to his honesty in the face of a corrupted humanity. The account begins with an unwilling visit to a dinner party where an insistent host—a total stranger “who just my name had got”—promises that the other guests will be his friends Sedley, Savile, and Buckhurst. Not surprisingly, these assurances remain unfulfilled. Timon’s company consists of four fools, “Halfwit and Huff, Kickum and Dingboy.” The hostess appears, an ancient flirt, and presides over a tedious banquet complete with displays of corrupted taste in food and poetry. Inevitably, rough verbal antics culminate in bouts of plate hurling and Timon’s own relieved escape into the night.

Rochester establishes the thematic unity of the poem by implying that Timon’s social and intellectual standards have been violated by the attitudes and actions of the host, his wife, and the four “hectors.” In the earlier model for the poem, the Horatian speaker was a paragon of good sense and propriety. Rochester’s Timon flaunts a delighted malice before the rest of the human race and does so in the bawdiest terms. Detailing the physical characteristics of the hostess, Timon develops a vicious portrait; the entire description, however, includes the most damning evidence—the victim’s conversation, which displays her foolishness, affectation, and crudity. The speaker’s character also comes under scrutiny; his curious interest in the dinner conversation and his obsession with sex create a disturbing uncertainty in the poem. Rochester may have meant to mock Timon for having agreed to attend the dinner party; his skeptical nature should have warned him against finding true companions. Also, the speaker’s sexual crudity, although strikingly overt, is at least without affectation. As in the earlier “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” the rake admits his belief in sexual freedom, his appreciation for honest, generous lust. Ultimately he finds frustration and humiliation. The same theme which appeared in the earlier work is alluded to in “Timon”; sensual experience is ultimately a failure. Timon realizes the accuracy of this attitude in his comments on the host’s wife: “Fit to give love . . . But age, beauty’s incurable disease, had left her more desire than power to please.” Timon’s faults cannot be ignored, but in contrast to the affected hosts and boorish guests he gains the reader’s trust.

“A Satire Against Mankind”

Rochester’s most impressive poem is his “A Satire Against Mankind.” It is a discourse in which the speaker offers the paradoxical thesis that it is better to be an animal than a man; however, Rochester is more concerned with emphasizing the loathsomeness of being human than the virtues of being an animal. He attacks Reason itself, the pure rationality that he had formerly worshiped.

The poem reflects the skepticism of the age, and the recurrent motif in Rochester’s work of a division between the actual and the ideal. The philosophy of cynicism goes back to classical sources, to Epicurus and the Skeptics. It seems that Rochester adopted their arguments in order to counter particular schools of rationalistic thought such as the vain and strident Christian rationalism of the Cambridge Platonists, the godlike reasoning eminence of the university Schoolmen, and the anti-Aristotelian rationalism of the Anglicans. The exaltation of humanity, the thesis that God is pure reason, the continual optimism about humanity’s capacities for perceiving the meaning of the cosmos and God’s laws through reason—all these notions were ridiculed by him.

Rochester’s immediate, most influential source was Hobbes, whose materialist-sensationalist philosophy was the basis for his view of human motivation. Every person is an enemy to every other person in his or her desire for gain, for safety, and for glory. This continual desire for security, for certainty, is characteristic of the libertine, who disdains convention and orthodoxy as paths to power. The rake instead exploits other people’s weaknesses, thus gaining mastery over their lives. Those conventional figures of the community who might censure him are hypocrites who have disavowed their true desires for gain and glory. All those virtues that humans profess to follow in the name of social order are merely rationalizations of their fear and desire for security, and Rochester improves on Hobbes, believing that humans only convert this fear into more “respectable” passions. Rochester exhibits a bitter, relentless cynicism about human possibility; even the rake’s mastery proves to be a painful failure.

The poem is a formal verse satire in which the satirist contemplates a particular topic and anticipates the imaginary response of someone else to his thoughts. This structure of the satire has caused much debate among critics who believe that the poem is a philosophical discourse on epistemology and ethics. Other scholars make a good case for the view that the poem is a unified polemic against human pride: pride in reason, learning, and “accomplishment.” Griffin accepts both viewpoints while offering his analysis of the work as primarily a four-part discourse, with a speaker presenting and defending the paradox that it is better to be an animal than a man.

The first part of the poem states the thesis, suggesting that all men are equally ridiculous, and proposes a distinction between wits and fools. This difference proves a false one. The second part raises the imagined objections of the satirist’s opponent, who offers a distinction between wit and reason that only reveals the ambiguous, confused nature of the opponent’s argument. The third part develops the satirist’s response to these objections, analyzing first reason and then humankind’s “wisdom” and “nature.” He seems willing to accept the middle ground between pure instinct and pure reason “which distinguishes by sense.” The paradoxical quality of the poem is again asserted as the satirist turns from this compromise to attack all humankind once more. Instinct, although preferable to right reason, remains unattainable since all people are “knaves.” The fourth part functions as the epilogue in which the satirist recapitulates his argument and in so doing reformulates his paradox. Significantly, Rochester adds here that all people are slaves, as well as knaves, only some are worse in these respects than others. The final line—“Man differs more from man, than man from beast”—sharpens the total satiric effect of the poem. Animals, after this exacting analysis, still remain closer to the ideal of godlike humans (“meek humble man of honest sense”) than the rabble (wits, fools, cowards, knaves, and the poet). The beasts are a better reflection of human moral ideals than are humans themselves.

“A Satire Against Mankind” remains an impressive effort and an example of the best Rochester was capable of during his mature period. Its effects are beautifully judged, as is its destructive critique of human pretension; however, Rochester’s own predicament as a man and as an artist persists with no real hope or secure possibility for a better world.

“An Epistolary Essay from M. G. to O. B. upon their Mutual Poems”

The sixteen poems of Rochester’s final period, the period of disillusionment and death, reflect a decline in the quantity and quality of his work. The most effective poem of this group is “An Epistolary Essay from M. G. to O. B. upon their Mutual Poems” (1679). Serving as a companion piece to “A Very Heroical Epistle in Answer to Ephelia” (1675), this informal critical essay expresses the views on love and poetry of a bold libertine persona, M. G. (John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave). The speaker writes to a friend, O. B. (John Dryden), in praise of the latter’s poems and in defense of his own violations of the traditional canons of good writing. Furthermore, after having lampooned in “A Satire Against Mankind” the idea that rational humans partake of the divine, Rochester here attacks the idea that poetry has a divine source. By employing this approach, he criticizes conventional wisdom, putting the burden of writing well on the poet’s egotism instead of on divine will. The argument concludes with the notion that a poet is his own best critic and must rely on his own self-judgment. The arrogance of the piece marks Rochester’s strength as a poet but his weakness as a man.

Confident about his own artistic strengths, he had nothing but contempt for the rabble of hacks and critics. His work possesses the poetic virtues of vigor and force; although often unconventional and strikingly obscene, his poems grow out of a literary tradition both classical and English. Although the spectacle of humankind provoked in him a Juvenalian outrage and profound disgust, he also revealed his admiration for personal goodness, for a man of Christlike humility and piety. The doubt that such a person existed would plague him his entire life; yet he continued the quest without abject despair. His complex emotional response to the literary, intellectual, and social milieu of the Restoration found an outlet in his poetry. Whether he projects rejection and nihilism or envisions an ideal which proves unreachable, Rochester remains one of the most original and notable poets of the age.