While living a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring, Rochester produced comic verse, scurrilous satires, and highly explicit erotica. His Selected Works, edited by Frank H. Ellis and now available from Penguin Classics, show him to be one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humor and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.
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John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Rochester's poetry, brilliantly annotated and introduced by David M. Vieth, has been a classic work for decades.

Rochester, incontestably the greatest of the Restoratoin Poets and reprobrates, is presented in Debt to Pleasure both in his own words and in the words of those who loved and loathed him. The book is a mosaic in which the poet's voice and the voice of his age sound with a startling, ribald and riotous clarity.

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-80), was a leading member of the group of "court wits" surrounding Charles II and one of the wittiest and most sexually explicit poets in English. In this long-awaited edition, Harold Love, a leading scholar of seventeenth-century manuscript circulation, presents a scholarly text based on detailed examination of Wilmot's manuscripts, with full textual and explanatory notes.

The Farce of Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery is a play written by English libertine John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester. Wilmot, who was portrayed in the movie The Libertine by Johnny Depp, was popularized in the 17th century as a poet and playwright. His works remaon popular today due to their raunchiness and pornographic language. This is a publication of his play The Farce of Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery, which is one of the most well known of his works. The Farce of Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery is highly recommended for those who are fans of John Wilmot...