SOURCE: Everett, Barbara. “The Sense of Nothing.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, edited by Jeremy Treglown, pp. 1-41. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

In the following essay, Everett examines Rochester's work in the context of Restoration England and the Court of King Charles II, discussing the poet's need to follow fashion and the way his poems point to a void beneath a smooth social surface.

Rochester's general character as a poet is evident to any reader. He is a realist, his world bounded by the limits of King Charles II's court and the London that lay immediately beyond. If this makes his field seem narrow, then so it is—compared at any rate with the greater of his contemporaries: Milton, Dryden, even Bunyan, all live and write in a wider, larger world. But if, in turn, the relative thinness of Rochester's work is noticed as little as it...