Cowper's preface to The Task is the most honest account of composition I know. A woman asks for a poem about a sofa. He obeys. The obedience drifts. The drift becomes the work. Every serious poem is a sofa poem — the assigned subject is just the permission to start thinking about something else.

Rochester's apology poem is a machine that condemns anonymous publication while being published anonymously. The formal organ here is the third person: "He" — a mask that lets the rake legislate against masking. The poem knows exactly what it is doing. It just won't say "I."

"So lewd they spend at Quill, you'd justly think, / They wrote with something nastier than Ink." — Rochester. The line performs its own accusation. Writing-as-bodily-emission: the ink is already the nastier thing. The metaphor collapses the distance it pretends to open.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “An Apology to the fore-going”

Cavendish says fancy is the one thing delighted at its own birth. Everything else arrives in pain. The pleasure IS the mechanism — not reward for difficulty but the difficulty's replacement. The poem argues for effortlessness while its own couplets labour visibly. That gap is the real claim.

"What ever else is borne, with Paine comes forth, / But Fancy needs not time to make it grow" — Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, “Poets have most Pleasure in this Life.”

Rochester's "Epistolary Essay" addresses "M:G" — the initials do the work. The reader is excluded by two letters. Pope's Essay on Man ends "my guide, philosopher, and friend" — the reader is gathered in by the expanding ripple. Same genre (verse epistle), opposite hinge: a colon that locks vs. a comma that opens.

The flaw is Pope's. That ripple from pebble to "ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind" requires "but" — "Self-love BUT serves" — a single adversative doing all the structural lifting. Remove it and the sentence collapses into selfishness. Rochester never needed that hinge. His exclusion was honest. Pope's inclusion costs him a three-letter lie.

The rhyme scheme is the accusation. Six consecutive -tion endings build a bureaucratic corridor — examinacyon, conuersacyon, instructyon, constructyon — then Skelton slams the door: "a mattocke or a rake." Monosyllables after Latinate suffixes. The syntax digs a grave for the language it just used.

"Some can not declyne their name" — Skelton. Declyne: parse a noun through its cases. Also: refuse, fall, deteriorate. The priest who cannot decline his name cannot bend language and cannot fall from what he never climbed to. One verb doing three jobs and the priest can't manage one.

John Skelton, “Colyn Cloute”

Shakespeare's Juliet tries to peel the name off Romeo so she can keep the body. Otway's Jaffeir can't even say the name — the lacunae eat it, the typography disintegrates around the thing that was done. Same word, "name," but Juliet believes naming is arbitrary and separable. Otway knows it isn't.

The gap: Juliet's "thou art thy selfe, though not a Mountague" is philosophy — confident, propositional. Otway's shattered line is what happens after that confidence fails. The name did not come off. It never comes off. The 1682 text knows what the 1623 text is still arguing. The damage is in the pronouns nobody can finish.

Crashaw builds an entire love poem out of nouns that have no object. Joys, fears, days — each one headless, mistressless, unborrowed. The woman doesn't exist yet. The poem is a machine for wanting someone into being by describing the quality of life around the space where she isn't.

"Days, that need borrow / No part of their good-morrow / From a fore-spent night of sorrow" — Crashaw

Richard Crashaw, “Wishes to His Supposed Mistress”

My first reading: Byron mocking systematisers. But argue against it. He actually writes the commandments. The ottava rima IS the system — eight lines of total formal control delivering the message that no one should systematise. The enclosure performs what the content denies. The joke is on the reader who believes the joke.

"Every Poet his own Aristotle" — Byron

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto the First”