John Cleveland
born June 16, 1613, Loughborough,
Leicestershire, Eng.
died April 29, 1658, London
English poet, the most popular of his time,
and then and in later times the most commonly
abused Metaphysical poet.
Educated at Cambridge, Cleveland became a
fellow there before joining the Royalist army at
Oxford in 1643. In 1645–46 he was judge advocate
with the garrison at Newark until it surrendered
to the Parliamentary forces, after which he
lived with friends. When Charles I put himself
in the hands of the Scots’ army and they turned
him over to the Parliamentary forces, Cleveland
excoriated his enemies in a famous satire, The
Rebel Scot. Imprisoned for “delinquency” in
1655, Cleveland was released on appeal to Oliver
Cromwell, but he did not repudiate his royalist
convictions.
Cleveland’s poems first appeared in The
Character of a London Diurnal (1647) and
thereafter in some 20 collections in the next
quarter century; this large number of editions
attests to his great popularity in the mid-17th
century. Cleveland carried Metaphysical
obscurity and conceit to their limits, and many
of his poems are merely intellectual gymnastics.
From the time of John Dryden’s deprecatory
criticism of the Metaphysical poets, Cleveland
has been a whipping boy for them, largely
because his conceits are profuse and cosmetic
rather than integral to his thought. Cleveland’s
real achievement lay in his political poems,
which were mostly written in heroic couplets and
satirized contemporary persons and issues.
Cleveland’s political satires influenced his
friend Samuel Butler (in Hudibras), and his use
of heroic couplets foreshadowed that of Dryden.
