Rochester's Poetry Analysis

1 Introduction
In a general sense, poems are personal, even autobiographical; they inevitably reflect, however directly or obliquely, the varied concerns and self-images of their authors. The rake in Rochester’s poems is inevitably a reflection of the historical rake…That he delighted in projecting an image of himself is also clear (Griffin 1973: 21)
This study aims to find out how Rochester has been related to his poetry and what consequences these relations have had for how we read his poetry. The most important editors, biographers and critical scholars of Rochester through the years will be explored as these scholars have contributed to the reconstruction of Rochester for the modern reader. Nilbett once asked a question the reader should
This is a crucial question which leads to another one: Can biography exist in a fictional text? The majority of the Rochester scholars seems to be certain that Rochester’s biography can be traced in his poetry. They tend to avoid calling the ‘I’ in the poem Rochester, and some also warn against doing so. However, though they do not necessarily see the poems as autobiographical, they draw relations between the biography, the historical context and the poetry. There is a need to outline how and perhaps why they are relating Rochester to his poems, and to discuss if such relations should be made. It might not be possible to reach a firm conclusion, but it is a topic that needs to be discussed. Both the author and the reader are central in such an examination. Though their often differ immensely in their views and methods, the major editors, biographers and critical scholars rely upon each other’s studies. One thing the scholars treated in this thesis have in common is the focus on biography, and there are not a great number of scholars who have chosen another approach to Rochester’s poetry. A few New Critics attempted to read the poems as
This partly constructed biography has been used to explain the poetry. Professor Germaine Greer, who has written the brief introduction John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2000), believes that ‘Twentieth-century literary study is more interested in poets rather than in poems and so, rather than seek Rochesterian poems, construct a personage, Rochester’ (2000: 1). This tendency might be particularly strong with Rochester because there seems to be a desire to find him in the poems. Greer claims that ‘Though the facts of Rochester’s life could be sorted out by the usual means adopted by serious historians, biographers of Rochester prefer their own insight to actual information, and often dispense with documentation all together’ (Greer 2000: 7). Is there perhaps a reluctance to dismiss the myths? Some Rochester scholars openly admit that a biographical approach gives the reading ‘spice’ and makes it more