A Rationale for Two Clusters of "Minor Writers"
It might help if I gave you an explanation of how I came to cluster together Finch, Montague, Prior. They're all generally considered "minor writers" in that great game of "who's the big cheese" played at MLA Conventions, departmental curriculum debates, publishing house strategy meetings, and few other places on earth. To their readers they were famous authors but some did not publish--in previous Norton-eras a neglect to blow one's own trumpet in public was considered lack of talent. But that was before feminist and marxist critics (small letters = not doctrinaire theorists but practical appliers of the method) showed that control of publishing tended to remain in male, nobility-pleasing hands until the 18th-19th century. Also, people started questioning the circumstances under which people from non-aristocratic or testosterone-challenged backgrounds could afford the time to be authors, the tasks of making a living or motherhood and authoring taking so much time from each other. These developments don't even consider the influence of the nearly all-male English departments of the early to mid-twentieth century, and the inevitable cooperation of early women scholars with the male "Good Old Boys Club" that ran departments, conventions, journals, anthology editorial boards, and so on.
Why are they writing as they are? Lady Mary WM takes up in poetic form the issues Astell raises in prose, and yet doesn't have exactly the same attitude toward them--why? And Matty Prior seems almost oblivious to the strife that marks the life of all three--what is he using poetry to do and how might that be related to his occupation or to a now familiar attitude toward how we should respond to heated public debate?
Rochester, Dryden, and Swift are all satirists, practitioners of the art of deflating the proud, and convicting the powerful of their crimes. They also take swipes at the relatively powerless and foolish. How do they differ? Look for their "norms," the standards of value they support either tacitly or overtly. Also, look for the "Horatian" (satire of folly) vs. "Juvenalian" (satire of crime) difference. Finally, both Dryden and Swift are "City men," residents of the middle-class regions of London and Dublin, and their targets are the middle class and their rival poets. Rochester is a court poet, and his targets are almost exclusively members of the court, and rival poets (including Milton!).
The "materialism," "skepticism," "atheism" and "deism" vocabulary terms belong most strongly with Rochester, but they're also terms relevant to the cultural assumptions of most of these characters. On another note, it's amusing to think that while Milton was writing Paradise Lost, Rochester was getting thrown in the Tower for abducting a beautiful heiress (whom he later married!), and between the publication of Milton's first edition of Paradise Lost (1667) and the second edition (1674), Rochester helped found a loose-knit club of noble roisterers, known as the "Ballers," who generally terrorized the citizens of London and pursued their daughters while conducting open affairs with the wives and mistresses of various nobles. One wonders how he, like those women raising children, had any time to write. Click here for Charles Whibley's measured appraisal of the "Wits" and their reputations in the "Court Poets" chapter of the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (N.Y.: Putnam, 1907-21) on Bartleby.com. Comparisons with modern poets and fiction writers like Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowrey, as well as with later rock-and-roll stars, might be instructive. At what point do materialism, skepticism, and the other philosophical supports for a bawdy lifestyle become mere excuses for addictive behavior? Does society need these clowns to puncture its illusions when hypocrisy rises to certain levels?