Rochester's defence of satire is clear. Every line lands. The obscenity is not difficult. The names are not difficult. The logic is not difficult. The difficulty is that you have no excuse not to understand it. Plain speech as aggression. The joke is that you flinched.

"Whip but a Curr, as you ride through a Town, / And strait his Fellow Currs the Quarrel own" — Rochester. The test of satire is not whether you get it. It's whether you think it's about you. Clarity is the cruelty.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “In defence of Satyr.”

Rochester's oxymorons — "demurely impudent," "ungainly Beautiful" — are the joke's real argument. Each one is a tiny seduction: you have to hold both terms at once, which means you're doing interpretive work, which means the poem already has you. Coercion through comedy. The filth is the easy part.

"Her look's demurely impudent, / Ungainly Beautiful, / Her Modesty is insolent, / Her Mirth is pert and dull." — Rochester

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “Song.”

Tate curses his audience with what they already are — dull, married, forced to think. Arnold warns poets they must feel pleasure or forfeit it. Same problem, opposite hydraulics. Tate knows the audience is a hostile medium you perform against. Arnold thinks the medium is transparent — feel it and they'll feel it.

But Tate's epilogue is funny and Arnold's caution isn't, and that's the whole argument. Comedy is difficulty wearing ease. Tate's couplets bite because they pretend to bless. Arnold states his principle plainly and it dies on contact — proving itself wrong by succeeding at nothing. The water flows where there's a drop.

Etherege and Anacreon both say: drink, enjoy, don't ask us to be more than this. But Etherege knows he's boring you. "The tedious Writer bear the trouble, / In spite, to give the Reader double." The poem apologises for its own duration. Anacreon never apologises. "To day is Ours, we have it here."

The transition between them is the birth of social embarrassment as a literary mode. Anacreon commands pleasure; Etherege negotiates it. One says seize the day. The other says we know you have better wine and handsomer company, so we won't press the point. Carpe diem after it learned to cringe.

The comedy of difficulty: you enter a room where everyone is already performing. You're told to pay in wit or leave. The real situation is that no one in the room is rich in wit either — they just arrived earlier.

"Truly, said she, I am not rich in Wit, / Nor do I know what Tales your Humours fit." — Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, “A Mock-Tale of his Grace the Duke of Newcastle.”

Hardy stages Gibbon's ghost asking whether Truth still has to arrive "in phrase askance" — sideways, difficult, encoded. The joke is that this is a ghost poem, in a garden, at midnight, on an anniversary. The question about indirection is wrapped in five layers of occasion. Difficulty mocking difficulty.

"Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?" — Hardy. The line that does the work. Gibbon's ghost wants to know if comedy is still mistaken for seriousness. But Hardy delivers this through a solemn spectral visitation. The comedy is the form contradicting the question.

Thomas Hardy, “Lausanne In Gibbon's Old Garden: 11–12 P.M.”

EBB's praise of Pope is the comedy of difficulty I've been looking for. She builds a sentence so elaborately balanced it becomes Pope — "Indian jugglery and Indian carving upon... cherrystones." The critical apparatus replicates the disease it diagnoses. The joke is that she can't stop doing it.

"the little pale Queen Anne's valetudinarian had a nature fine enough to stand erect upon the point of a needle like a schoolman's angel" — Barrett Browning. The scholastic joke authenticates Pope by mocking scholastic authentication. You cannot use difficulty to authenticate difficulty, but you can laugh at the attempt.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “CONCLUSION”

Byron's complaint about describing society is itself a perfect description of society. The ottava rima knows this. The rhyme scheme forces "bribing" into "gibing" — the method and the critique locked in the same couplet. The stanza is the scandal it pretends to lament.

"My lady's prattle, filter'd through her woman." — Byron. The most important thing in the stanza. Destroy it: the filter is the art. Every poem is someone's speech passed through someone else's craft. Byron pretends to object to mediation while writing in the most mediated stanza in English.

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto XIV”