Лучшие книги Джона Уилмота

В книгу вошли все стихотворения (билингва) и избранные письма замечательного английского поэта и либертина Джона Уилмота, графа Рочестера. Это первое полное издание любовной поэзии, сатир и памфлетов поэта на русском языке. Письма Рочестера к своей жене, своей возлюбленной Элизабет Барри и к своему другу Генри Сэвилу демонстрируют мастерство легкой, разговорной прозы. В книгу также включены отрывки из воспоминаний современников о характере милорда, его биография и статья о творчестве поэта.

Данное издание предназначено как для специалистов в области зарубежной поэзии, так и для самого широкого круга читателей.

John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Rochester’s poetry, brilliantly annotated and introduced by David M. Vieth, has been a classic work for decades.

While living a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring, Rochester produced comic verse, scurrilous satires, and highly explicit erotica. His Selected Works, edited by Frank H. Ellis and now available from Penguin Classics, show him to be one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humor and humanity, Rochester’s poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.

'If I by miracle can be
This livelong minute true to thee
'Tis all that heav'n allows.'

The Earl of Rochester was England's first celebrity poet, a byword for the theatricality, licentiousness, and scepticism of the Restoration age. But his scandalous reputation belies the variety and sophistication of his work: his love poems set new standards not only of sexual explicitness but also of psychological acuity and lyric grace, while his satires broke new ground as much by the refinement of their ironies as in the brutality of their invective. A fascinatingly contradictory figure, Rochester emerges more clearly than ever from this new edition, the first selection of his work in modern spelling to take account of recent revolutionary advances in textual scholarship. It includes only poems now securely attributed to the poet, in texts based not on the posthumous and unreliable printed editions but on the most authoritative manuscripts which circulated in his lifetime.

Building on the strength of Keith Walker’s acclaimed The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1984), leading scholar Nicholas Fisher presents a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the work of one the greatest Restoration wits.

Includes the text of Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of Fletcher’s revenge tragedy Valentinian, in a text that readily identifies Rochester’s revisions
Presents the poems in versions that were current during Rochester’s lifetime, allowing the reader to experience the poems as Rochester’s contemporaries did
Incorporates insights and discoveries made over the last twenty-five years and texts of manuscripts that previously were unavailable for study

Rochester's poems have been on the one hand neglected, derided or viewed with disgust. They have also been acclaimed as works of genius. They can be considered shocking and obscene, or masterpieces, or both at once, according to one's point of view. However, they have generally received less attention than they deserve. Recently, though, interest in the poet has revived and this edition (the first for fifteen years) provides scholarly texts of all the poems. The editor has examined the entirety of extant manuscripts and printed editions, and presents collated versions in tactfully regularized "old spelling". All substantive variants are recorded, including in some cases complete alternative versions of poems. The poems are arranged by genre, and where possible chronologically within each genre. There are notes on dating and contemporary allusions, and the introduction includes an outline of Rochester's life.

Excluding Rochester's prose and dramatic works, this edition attempts to assemble every scrap of the nondramatic verse on which Rochester's fame as a poet chiefly rests.