joanna wrote:
>
> He was a precocious, talented libertine. Some argue that the language
> had reached such a pitch of perfection by his time that Rochester
> could not but lisp in verse. But I think he really was a first rate
> poet doing his best in a blighted time.
>
> But the philosophy he espouses, is nothing new -- the vanity of man,
> which expresses itself through bondage to the senses, overreliance on
> logic/reason, and foolish imagination.
Joanna & I have, I think, conflicting assumptions about the place of "The New" in poetry. I take Pound's "Make It New" to be a rewording of Pope's, "What oft was _Thought_, but ne'er so well _Exprest_." That is, neither Pound nor Pope (nor Cox) would accept the relevance of Joanna's "the philosophy he expouses is nothing new." (I would suppose the actual _new_, which is rare, emerges from the contemplation of new practice, not from the genius or intellectual power of the isolated thinker or writer.) Rochester's "philosophy," then, is neither more nor less "new" than that of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Richardson, et al. And in each of these cases newness is simply irrelevant to the power of their works.
I'm not quite sure why a "time" that gave us Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Pascal, Vivaldi, Milton, Hobbes, Moliere, Racine, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Newton, R. Walpole, Montesquieu, Locke, Bach, Richardson, Handel was all that "blighted." (And this list is intended to suggest that it is not easy to demarcate "a time," blighted or otherwise. See The Sandwishman over on Pen-L on the difficulties of defining "a generation." I choose, somewhat arbitrarily, 1630 to 1750 as the relevant "time" for Rochester.)
Carrol
P.S. What opening in Engllish poetry can quite match the opening couplet of "A Ramble in St. James's Park":
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse Of who fucks who, and who does worse. . . .
It is this control of the decorum of diction and subject which unites Milton, Rochester at his best, Pope, & Richardson.