Rochester’s Corporate Conscience

Abstract

This article reexamines the relation between consciousness and the individual mind in the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Arguing against a common critical stance that finds the poems deflationary—holding mind apart from matter in an ever-imperfect enjoyment—I claim instead that conscious feeling for Rochester is public, as the involuntary identification with a role or type. The poems may thus be read against their contemporary moment, in which corporate forms were rapidly proliferating and individual experience was solicited by many of them at once. Poetry offered Rochester various schemas through which such experience could be arranged and tweaked. I develop these claims through a reading of Gilbert Burnet’s dialogues with the dying Rochester, in which the cleric worked to control the poet’s leaky style, which threatened to incorporate others, and into three of Rochester’s best-known poems, which address problems of action by locating group identity in mutual experience of the same role. Ultimately, this essay stresses the positive and constructive aspects of Rochester’s work, engaged as he is with urgent questions about Restoration corporate life, as well as contemporary debates concerning the nature and location of consciousness. Linking the first with the second, I argue, is Rochester’s prime achievement.