SOURCE: Quentin, David. “The Missing Foot of Upon Nothing and Other Mysteries of Creation.” In That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by Nicholas Fisher, pp. 89-100. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Quentin examines the relationship of form and content in Upon Nothing, considering the question of whether the missing metrical foot at the end of line 42 reveal something about the qualities of nothing discussed in the poem.

In John Lennard's Poetry Handbook, subtitled ‘A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism’, there is a section intended to bring comfort to worried A-level students and undergraduates, and it advises them when confronted with a poem in an exam to ‘make a short technical description’, after which it assures them they will suffer ‘an embarrassment of things to remark’, top of the list being ‘metrical conformity and deviation’.¹ Armed...