Reading Rochester

This collection of new essays explores all aspects of one of the most intriguing and contoversial English poets, the seventeenth-century libertine the Earl of Rochester. Different sections focus on sexual politics, on the poetry of intellect, and on Rochester and his contemporaries. The aim of the book is to read Rochester and to open up the poems to further reading.

Rochester's personal notoriety is in a complex relationship to his writing and to the presonality he created for himself through that writing. These essays offer a fresh reassessment of the range and quality of a writer only recently widely available, who is currently becoming visible as one of the great writers of his century.

Edward Burns is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Liverpool.