First, a poet

THE SATYR: AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WORK, DEATH AND SALVATION OF JOHN WILMOT, SECOND EARL OF ROCHESTER.

By Cephas Goldsworthy.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 302 pages; £25

EVEN to his contemporaries, Rochester was a legendary figure. One of the youngest and most handsome courtiers of the restored Charles II, he was the favourite of a king whose wit, lasciviousness and serious intellectual interests he shared. He was banished from court several times, but Charles's pleasure in his conversation always resulted in his recall. His authentic adventures included the attempted abduction of an heiress (whom he later married), smashing a phallic-shaped sundial in the royal gardens during a drunken spree, and a violent affray with the watch at Epsom in which one of his companions was killed.

Quite apart from his reputation as a poet, he was feted in the writings of his friends, notably in Sir George Etherege's comedy, “The Man of Mode”. Just before he died in 1680, at the age of 33, destroyed by alcoholism and syphilis, Rochester's legend took a surprising turn. After a series of conversations with an Anglican rationalist divine, Gilbert Burnet, the sceptical libertine made a death-bed conversion which was celebrated in the devotional literature of the succeeding century.

Engaging as it is, the Rochester legend has always been a distraction. It has resulted in many apocryphal stories and dubious attributions, and it can still divert attention from the poetry. It is Rochester's achievement as a poet which commands our interest and makes him something more than a luridly colourful period figure. For all the brevity of his career, Rochester is a crucial figure in the development of English verse satire and the Horatian epistle, a student of his elder French contemporary Boileau, and an important exemplar for later poets as different as Alexander Pope and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

Cephas Goldsworthy's “The Satyr” gives us the legend. Although there are no footnotes to sources, the book shows some acquaintance with modern Rochester scholarship and its rejection of spurious verse from his canon—but only intermittently. Anecdotes concerning Rochester and his crony George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, are retailed without any indication that they have, in fact, been discredited; poems no longer attributed to Rochester are cited as if they were authentic. Mr Goldsworthy quotes liberally from the poetry, but repeatedly reads it as straightforward autobiography. For example, we are told that “My dear mistress has a heart” is addressed to Elizabeth Barry, an actress, which is incautious given the uncertain dating of this song, and indeed of most of Rochester's poems. More generally, while of course some of the satires include references to actual persons, as often as not in 17th-century love poetry the emotion is genuine but the addressee is fictitious.

A less simplistic way to relate Rochester's poetry to his life would be to read the former as an exploration of what it means to live according to libertine values. In his best satires and even some of the lyrics he articulated an anti-rational nihilistic vision scarcely found elsewhere in English verse. Such a task belongs to a critical biography. There is no mistaking Mr Goldsworthy's enthusiasm for his subject, but his book is essentially biography as entertainment.