SOURCE: Knight, Charles A. “The Paradox of Reason: Argument in Rochester's ‘Satyr Against Mankind.’” Modern Language Review 65, no.2 (April, 1970): 254–60.

In the essay below, Knight argues against previous critics' contentions that A Satire Against Mankind should be seen in terms of Rochester's interest in seventeenth-century materialism and his eventual conversion, and maintains that the poem is more complex and playful than previously supposed, which is evident from Rochester's handling of his argumentative method and his paradoxical treatment of reason.

One of the most apparently pessimistic elements of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind is not his attack on speculative reason but his attack on human nature itself. The forceful lines that open the poem are balanced by Rochester's later distinction between deductive, scholastic reason and ‘that reason which distinguishes by sense / And gives us rules of good and ill from thence’ (l. 100). Thus the opening picture of man's delusive intellectual journey...