Heather McHugh: Nakedness in Numbers (July 1998)

In this lecture, Heather McHugh examines the intersections of nakedness and numbers in “a single curve in English poetry from Wyatt to Rochester.” Subverting our usual sense of the naked vs. the veiled, McHugh argues their identity as she explores the revelatory “covers” of measure in poems by Robert Herrick, John Donne, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the Earl of Rochester, as they exemplify “that age’s peculiar capacity to marry the prurient with the precise, the salacious with the fastidious.”