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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Selected Works (Penguin Classics)

Literature & Fiction

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

H. Frank Ellis

History & Criticism

Penguin Classics

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 Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (|c OET |t Oxford English Texts)

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

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.

The Debt to Pleasure

Carcanet Pr

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Books by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester