Introduction

Summary

Of all the major English poets, Rochester is the most irrepressibly disruptive. The very idea of the anarchic libertine poet, as created in the gossip of his contemporaries and in the notoriety of unpublishably obscene texts, disrupts any attempt to account for his writings from within the institutions and procedures of the Academy. To submit Rochester to scholarship is to effect an even starker juxtaposition of a poet's emotion and its eventual recollection into the tranquillity of footnotes than that of Yeats's ‘The Scholars’:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate their lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love's despair

To flatter beauty's ignorant ear …

… Lord, what would they say

Did Catullus walk that way?

Yeats in mid-life is nervously defending a body of work that, like the life inscribed on it, is already judged eminent, already constructing an eternity for itself. Rochester did not live into a premature and prolonged old age like Yeats's, nor did he gather texts together to construct an oeuvre, with the result that matters of authorship and ascription have dominated Rochester studies for most of this century. This, and the issue of Rochester's obscenity, paradoxically delayed the appearance of an authoritative text until the current era of critical fashion, in which the author has been declared dead, and in which the compilation is possible of ‘Rochester’ as a person-shaped uncontestably authored text to replace the fragmented self-obscuring ‘Rochester’ of historical gossip; the notoriety of censorship no longer seems a natural or inevitable activity.