
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
with a monkey.
I will confess I had not heard of Rochester until I got well into my University career. In retrospect, I find this rather surprising, as I am quite sure teaching Rochester in high school would do away with poetry's unfair reputation of being boring in one fell swoop. I am not sure whether his absence is due to embarrassment on the teachers' part or a fear of irate parents accusing them of corrupting their young.
Rochester himself is said to have been corrupted at Oxford (which he started at 12 and left at 14 with an MA and a number of new and exciting interests). He belongs to the box labelled Restoration literature, and I think I should probably get into some particulars on that score before I go on.
There is a tendency, I think, to see the 20th century as a steady breaking away from the repression of the past. It starts around the
fin de siècle, one might imagine, and moves via the Edwardians through the 20s, and then storms towards the finish line of total freedom from the 60s onwards. And before that, in this narrative of steady progression, the Victorians were repressed, only to be outdone by the people before them, and the people before them until you get back to the Middle Ages, when everyone wore chastity belts and prayed all the time in order to completely suppress their sinful flesh.
The error will of ...
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