https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50453/the-mock-song
You may not know John Wilmot’s work, and he’s probably best known today for his crudity, but writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Hazlitt and Germaine Greer all found something unique and admirable in this arch satirist, and his contemporary translations of the Latin classics, made while he was in the court of Charles II, had him held in high regard for a long time (until the Victorians cut his metaphorical balls off). Johnny Depp also played him in The Libertine (if you’re into your film).
Despite being born in 1647, I find something so modern in much of Rochester’s poetry, and you can see lines from his work through to Tennyson (who would quote him), Rimbaud and even Larkin, and to the lyrics of singers like Jim Morrison or Nick Cave. I studied Rochester alongside his contemporary and admirer Andrew Marvell (who I also love but who is so very different!) at University, and much like Swift after him, Rochester managed to deliver such vitriol in his verse (as here), but at the same time he was able to create amazing works like Against Constancy, a beautiful exhortation of youthful exuberance and libertinism, and to deliver an examination of reason and human nature in A Satire Against Reason and Mankind. Sadly, much of his work was lost as his mother tore up the pages so stop his ‘filth’ being better known, not seeing the artistic value of his words.
I’ve chosen this rather nasty example as an introduction to him however, as it was an inspiration for one of my own, smile, included in my selected poems, though in my version I use the ending imagery as a starting point, and present an impotent and passive recipient, with all of the internal anger but none of the passion A modern Rochester dulled by materialism and popular culture at the expense of human interaction and pure desire.
Though I don’t use this approach any more, quite often when I used to write I would take a poem I loved and pick a theme, phrase, narrative or title and develop my own spin on it, so it won’t be difficult to see deliberate shades of Pound, Blake, and Thomas, to name but three, in some of my earlier poetry.