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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