The brightest star at the court of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), lived a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring that led to his death at the age of thirty-three - described by Samuel Johnson as having blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness . Rochester was also one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century, writing comic verse, scurrilous satires and highly explicit erotica - from the bawdy self-portrait in The Maimed Debauchee and the tender passion of Absent from thee I languish still to the comic world-weariness of Upon Nothing and A Satyr against Mankind , which mocks human follies. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humour and humanity, Rochester s poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.