Thug, rapist, poetic visionary: the contradictory Earl of Rochester

Despite being an earl, Rochester is very nearly a major poet. His poems and letters were torn up by a zealous mother after his death, bent on destroying anything obscene or scandalous. A good deal was lost, but a lot was passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied (it was never printed in Rochester’s lifetime). His full development as a poet cannot be traced, but some of what survives is tantalisingly rich, and has fascinated many subsequent writers.

He is one of those rare poets who come to mean much more to later generations. ‘Upon Nothing’ bears a bleak relationship to the end of Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, and, very powerfully, to Hardy’s poem on the sinking of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. The despairing lines from ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’ were much quoted by Tennyson, and had a definite influence on ‘In Memoriam’:

…make him understand
After a search so painful, and so long
That all his life he has been in the wrong.