ABSTRACT

George Etherege’s translation of the earlier French poem ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ sparks a renewed interest in the impotency poem form following the Restoration of monarchy to England. Three years after the publication of Etherege’s poem, William Wycherley enjoyed early financial success by adapting the motif of impotence for effecting satiric critique of social ills in his play The Country Wife (1675).1 In his Miscellany verse (1704), collected over the 1680s and 1690s, Wycherley was to return to the concept of impotence with his own more clearly socially satirical verse, perhaps in an attempt to ‘cash in’ on the vogue for impotency poetry seen in the preceding decades.