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Cover

Selected Poems

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Edited by Paul Davis

14 March 2013

ISBN: 9780199584321

192 pages
Paperback
196x129mm

In Stock

Oxford World's Classics

Price: £9.99

Rochester's scandalous reputation belies the variety and sophistication of his love poems and satires. This new edition, with modern spelling, is the most textually up to date, based not on the unreliable printed editions but on the most authoritative manuscripts. It includes a valuable introduction, helpful notes, and an index of manuscripts.

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Description

Rochester's scandalous reputation belies the variety and sophistication of his love poems and satires. This new, modern-spelling edition is the most textually up to date, based not on the unreliable printed editions but on the most authoritative manuscripts. It includes a valuable introduction, helpful notes, and an index of manuscripts.

  • A new selection of Rochester's famously explicit verse, that goes beyond its popular reputation for pornographic or vitriolic directness to bring out the variety and sophistication of his work.
  • Includes only poems now securely established as Rochester's, in modern spelling.
  • Uses texts not based on the posthumous and unreliable printed editions but on the most authoritative manuscripts which circulated in Rochester's lifetime, making it the most reliable edition available.
  • Texts of the poems Rochester translated and imitated are included in the notes, enabling readers to explore his creatively intricate involvement with the work of his ancient and modern counterparts, a crucial aspect of the poet's genius.
  • Introduction examines issues of attribution and manuscript circulation and situates Rochester within a larger intellectual movement of libertinism.
  • Full notes help readers unfamiliar with Restoration usage to understand meaning and the subtler connotations of words and phrases.
  • Index of Manuscripts.

About the Author(s)

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Edited by Paul Davis, Reader in English, University College London

Paul Davis is the author of Translation and the Poet's Life: the Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726 (OUP, 2008).

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