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.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies
Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.

‘Huddled’ is one of those specific, painfully physical but transfiguring words, full of emotion. Henry James borrowed it when Mrs Wix and Maisie visit Clara Matilda’s ‘little huddled grave’ in What Maisie Knew.

There is, too, the obscene poetry, which refuses to be put aside as unworthy or undignified. Rochester’s reputation meant that any old filth was regularly ascribed to him after his death. When looking at the false Rochester ascriptions, it doesn’t take long to see that the wit, variety and disgust of his genuine poems were unique. The court play Sodom is a good example; gleefully obscene, with characters called Buggeranthus and Fuckadilla, it grows tedious after 30 lines, and most of it couldn’t be by Rochester.