John Wilmot

John Wilmot (1647-1680) was an English poet, courtier, satirist, and the second Earl of Rochester. His major works include A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, The Disabled Debauchee, The Imperfect Enjoyment, and a body of lyrics, songs, lampoons, and dramatic writing. John Wilmot mattered because he gave Restoration libertine poetry one of its sharpest and most scandalous voices. His work mixes wit, obscenity, philosophical skepticism, sexual candor, and bitter moral intelligence. A favorite and problem at the court of Charles II, he became famous for brilliance, excess, illness, and early death. Later readers have seen in him both a comic destroyer of polite hypocrisy and a writer haunted by emptiness. His quotes endure because they puncture confident theories about children, marriage, and life with the rough corrective of experience. His wit still makes worldly certainty collapse under experience.

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