John Oldham's poetry developed in eight years from pious panegyrics, to mock-heroic satires on libertinism and violence, to self-conscious meditations on art, to moral satires about his era. In most of these works his theme is liberty from the middle way, whether in pursuit of virtue, lust, revenge, or artistic creation. Oldham, who died at age thirty, seems forever caught like Catullus in the brashness of youth. He celebrates, whether in panegyrical or mock-heroic mode, the escape from popularity and mediocrity, from the conventional constraints on personal and artistic self-will. His fame first rested on four mock-heroic Satyrs Upon The Jesuits (1681) started in December 1678 at the height of the public hysteria over the pretended Popish Plot. In his lifetime they remained his claim to fame. Oldham, however, was also a scholar-poet in the line of two other scholar-poets of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson and Abraham Cowley. Before...