Two Pole-Vaulters of Their Times: The Poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Irving Layton

Abstract

Abstract This article compares the poetic output of the Anglo-Canadian writer Irving Layton with that of the famous Restoration rake and court poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Layton himself provided the connection in his wholehearted vindication of the seventeenth century as a time of “intellectual ferment”, “criticism and impatience for change”. Layton’s debt to Nietzsche and Rochester’s to his contemporary philosopher Hobbes, respectively, provide the thread through which a striking similarity of values and thematic concerns, of the quality of the amatory experience described; of their criticism of mankind, its institutions and even of themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other, of shared poetic formulas, sources of inspiration (classical, Elizabethan, satiric) and idiom string together in creative work that displays quite striking affinities, the product of similar vital stances.