Selected Poems

The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), was a rake and libertine who lived a life of riotous debauchery and sexual adventuring. He was described by Samuel Johnson as having blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness' and his reckless career led to an early death at the age of thirty-three. Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most outrageous poets of the 17th century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires, passionate love-poems and highly explicit erotica, from The Maimed Debauchee' to A Satyr against Mankind'. His scandalous behaviour and great sense of humour brought characteristic frankness and force to his work, which holds up a mirror to the follies of his age.