Two Pole-Vaulters of Their Times

with that of the famous Restoration rake and court poet John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester. Layton himself provided the connection in his wholehearted vindication of
the seventeenth century as a time of “intellectual ferment”, “criticism and impatience
for change”. Layton’s debt to Nietzsche and Rochester’s to his contemporary philosopher
Hobbes, respectively, provide the thread through which a striking similarity of values
and thematic concerns, of the quality of the amatory experience described; of their
criticism of mankind, its institutions and even of themselves, on the one hand, and,
on the other, of shared poetic formulas, sources of inspiration (classical, Elizabethan,
satiric) and idiom string together in creative work that displays quite striking affi nities,
the product of similar vital stances.