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Seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries
In the 17th century John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
(1647–80) was notorious for obscene verses, many of
which were published posthumously in compendiums of
poetry by him and other Restoration rakes such as Sir
Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset,
and George Etherege. Though many of the poems attributed
to Rochester were actually by other authors, his
reputation as a libertine was such that his name was
used as a selling point by publishers of collections of
erotic verse for centuries after. One poem which
definitely was by him was "A Ramble in St. James's Park"
in which the protagonist's quest for healthy exercise in
the park uncovers instead "Bugg'ries, Rapes and Incest"
on ground polluted by debauchery from the time when
"Ancient Pict began to Whore". This poem was being
censored from collections of Rochester's poetry as late
as 1953, though, in line with a general change in
attitudes to sexuality, it was recently dramatised as a
scene in the film The Libertine about his life.
English collections of erotic
verse by various hands, include the Drollery collections
of the 17th century; Pills to Purge Melancholy
(1698–1720); the Roxburghe Ballads; Bishop Percy's
Folio; The Musical Miscellany; National Ballad and Song:
Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year AD 1800
(1895-7) edited by J. S. Farmer; the three volume
Poetica Erotica (1921) and its more obscene supplement
the Immortalia (1927) both edited by T. R. Smith.[9]
French collections include Les Muses gaillardes (1606)
Le Cabinet satyrique (1618) and La Parnasse des poetes
satyriques (1622).
A famous collection of four erotic poems, was published
in England in 1763, called An Essay on Woman. This
included the title piece, an obscene parody of Alexander
Pope's "An Essay on Man"; "Veni Creator: or, The Maid's
Prayer", which is original; the "Universal Prayer", an
obscene parody of Pope's poem of the same name, and "The
Dying Lover to his Prick", which parodies "A Dying
Christian to his Soul" by Pope. These poems have been
attributed to John Wilkes and/or Thomas Potter and
receive the distinction of being the only works of
erotic literature ever read out loud, in their entirety
in the House of Lords--before being declared obscene and
blasphemous by that august body and the supposed author,
Wilkes, declared an outlaw.
Robert Burns worked to collect and preserve Scottish
folk songs, sometimes revising, expanding, and adapting
them. One of the better known of these collections is
The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not by
Burns), a collection of bawdy lyrics that were popular
in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th
century
Erotic Literature - Nineteenth century
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