Sunday, December 5, 2004

Wilmot / Rochester

My blog was mentioned in a Bookslut post on John Wilmot (only a tiny jump in new visitors but thanks anyway). Don't know how long ago I first heard about Rochester--which is how he is apparently supposed to be referred to; being an American this sort of stuff is opaque to me--but picked up that Everyman collection as soon as it appeared. Makes you wonder what other stuff got passed around in Restoration samzidat and disappeared into a near-by fire. Rochester had enough of a literary reputation that some of his more, er, accessible poems show up in anthologies. I think there are even samples in The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse but can't look that up right now and Yale published a complete poems sometime in the 60s.



Another interesting to non-poetry-readers poet--though from a later era and quite different from Rochester in almost every way--is Christopher Smart who jumped between drunken sprees and religious madness (literally: he spent years in asylums) and wrote dense, highly charged proto-free verse that is sometimes like nothing else you've ever seen. Penguin put out a good selection several years ago but it's now out of print.