SOURCE: Clark, Stephen. “‘Something Genrous in Meer Lust’?: Rochester and Misogyny.” In Reading Rochester, edited by Edward Burns, pp. 21-41. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

In the essay that follows, Clark points out that female readers and critics have been surprisingly uncritical of the misogynistic elements in Rochester's poetry, concluding there must be a quality in his poetry that elicits this response. Clark seeks to discern this quality by assessing the degree of “progressivism” in his libertinism, analyzing his plaintiveness and vulnerability, and exploring the paradoxes of the failure of the body in his poetry.

Given Rochester's undisputed status as ‘one of the dirtiest poets in the canon’,¹ one might think that any sustained consideration of his work would at some point involve detailed attention to the issue of misogyny. This has not, however, proved to be the case. It is not that feminist criticism has neglected his...