Rochester: The Poems in Context.

Marianne Thormahlen hopes her book Rochester: The Poems in Context will "[go] some way toward erasing the stubborn remains of the wicked-Earl-who-wrote-with-ease image" (8) of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Given how many of Rochester's poems have such subjects and titles as "Signior Dildo," "Upon His Leaving His Mistress," and "Against Constancy," the persistence of that image is, perhaps, only to be expected. To rehabilitate, or at least to supplement, Rochester's literary reputation, Thormahlen "emphasise[s] the way in which physical and mental experience are brought together in his work' (1). She does so by elucidating the intellectual traditions behind his poetry, traditions that for her are the most important elements of "context." Figuring less heavily in her notion of context is Rochester's own social experience in Restoration England.

In some ways, Thormahlen's method succeeds. Elaborating the literary ancestry of "An Allusion to Horace," for example, she helpfully clarifies the particular standards by which Rochester judged poetry as well as his more evident ad hominem satiric techniques against poets and playwrights whom he disliked. In treating a wide sampling of Rochester's oeuvre, topically organized, she shows the breadth of his literary and social allusive range. Her attempt to show Rochester as a poet of more intellectual depth than previously acknowledged backfires, however, when she discusses his work in terms of what it is not. In the section on the love lyrics, for example, she favorably contrasts a lyric by Sedley, Rochester's contemporary, to Rochester's "Against Constancy": "Nothing in the entire Rochester canon corresponds to this tender security in the love of a perfect woman' (64). By judging Rochester's work against those standards most likely to label it licentious, she constrains it within an implicit dyadic logic, of which the opposite pole in this case is sexual security or fidelity.

Thormahlen adopts such terms for her analysis in part because she is engaged in a critical dialogue with other Rochester critics, especially David M. Vieth, David Farley-Hills, and Dustin Griffin, who have addressed similar questions. She cites them exhaustively and answers them carefully, so much so that their questions often become hers. Her focus on their response to Rochester's poetry comes at the cost of neglecting Rochester's contemporary social context. Elaborating that context might help her answer one of the most interesting questions raised by her analysis of the love lyrics, namely why Rochester frequently portrays himself egregiously disregarding social norms. The degree to which his poetry flouts conventions of sexual propriety even as it considers the costs of doing so suggests that social context mattered to him a good deal. Like some Restoration drama, Rochester's poetry complicated conventional notions of whether and how male sexual identity and the male subject-position are related, justifying, I think, Thormahlen's sense that there is more at work in the poetry than sheer uncomplicated delight in obscenity. Greater consideration of how his poems circulated and who read them, an issue Thormahlen occasionally hints at without developing (see, for example, pages 122-23, 159, 198), would have helped clarify Rochester's purposes by showing to whom he addressed himself both within and without his wide social circle. How we evaluate his poetry does depend in part on what we understand as its intellectual context, which this book develops carefully, but it also depends on how we think Rochester used that intellectual context in his critique of social norms and practices, which this book often overlooks.

ANNE K. IGROOK University of Michigan