In the following essay I seek to provide some context for the particular twists and inversions that characterize Rochester's lyric poetry. The context I suggest is not biographical, but social and therefore, ultimately, historical; that is, I seek to locate the various affirmations and debunkings that characterize these poems in the wider, class-marked discursive economy of the Restoration. But I attempt this act of location by attention to the tone of voice and shifts of register within the poetry, and to its differing rhetorical appeals. In this, my enterprise has a generally Bakhtinian inspiration; not so much the Bakhtin of the ‘carnivalesque’—though he makes a brief appearance—but the Bakhtin who insists on the socially marked nature of all discourse.

I begin with a brief comment from an early nineteenth-century response to Rochester.

These remarks from Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets in 1818 are almost the sum total of his comments on Rochester; their paradoxical condensation nevertheless provides a way into the intense negativity of his lyrical poetry.