The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), lived a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three. He was described by Samuel Johnson as having "blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness". Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires and highly explicit erotica. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humour and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.--From publisher description.

Rochester, incontestably the greatest of the Restoration poets and reprobates, is presented in The Debt to Pleasure both in his own words and in the words of those who loved and loathed him. The book is a mosaic in which the poet's voice and the voice of his age sound with startling, ribald and riotous clarity.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is considered to be one of the most complex poets of the 17th century. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humor and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.

John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Rochester's poetry, brilliantly annotated and introduced by David M. Vieth, has been a classic work for decades. Rochester had many admirers: Graham Greene wrote Lord Rochester's Monkey; Daniel Defoe quoted him often; Tennyson recited his poems; Voltaire admired his satire for 'energy and fire'; Goethe could quote him in English; and Hazlitt said that 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds' and that 'his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'. Book jacket.