Perfect and Imperfect Enjoyments

This selection presents lyric and satirical poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, written in the Restoration court milieu of the 1660s and 1670s. The pieces include libertine songs, lampoons on Charles II and his courtiers, translations and imitations, and longer poems on sexual failure, reason, and the emptiness of fashionable pleasure. Typical speakers are rakes, scorned lovers, and a satirist who turns the same wit on himself. There is no continuous narrative. The volume is a gathered reading of Rochester's verse rather than a life told in poems or a single long satire.

Bound in full cream vellum with extra illustrations loosely inserted. Issued in a dark brown cloth-covered clamshell box.