A native of Loughborough, Leicestershire, was educated at Christ’s College, and St. John’s College, Cambridge. He had the honour of being the first poetical champion of the royal cause, and suffered imprisonment when the opposition prevailed. He was for some time a tutor at St. John’s College, and subsequently lived in chambers at Gray’s Inn, where he died in 1659. “The King’s Disguise,” 1646, 4to. “A London Diurnal-maker,” &c., 1647, ’54, 4to. “The Rustic Rampant,” 1658, 8vo. “Poems, Orations, and Epistles,” 1660, 12mo. “Petition to the Lord Protector for the Scots Rebel: a satirical Poem.” “Works,” 1687, 8vo.
Personal
He was a fellow of St. John’s Colledge in Cambridge, where he was more taken notice of for his being an eminent disputant, than a good poet. Being turned out of his fellowship for a malignant he came to Oxford, where the king’s army was, and was much caressed by them. He went thence to the garrison at Newark upon Trent, where upon some occasion of drawing of articles, or some writing, he would needs add a short conclusion, viz. “and hereunto we annex our lives, as a labell to our trust.” After the king was beaten out of the field, he came to London, and retired in Grayes Inne. He, and Sam. Butler, &c. of Grayes Inne, had a clubb every night. He was a corner plump man, good curled haire, darke browne. Dyed of the scurvy, and lies buried in St. Andrew’s church, in Holborne, anno Domini 165. .
In the character of Cleveland there is much to admire. He was steadfast in his principles when such men as Waller cringed and vacillated; he entered into the thick of the conflict with arm and pen while Cowley and Davenant fled to the French court, serving the cause far away from the actual scenes of struggle and distress.
General
Admired Cleveland.
He was justly esteemed a man of wit; but his writings abound with strained and far-fetched metaphors, which is a fault objected to Butler himself. That great poet has condescended to imitate, or copy Cleveland, in more instances than occurred to Dr Grey in his notes upon “Hudibras.”
Of all the cavalier poets, the one who did his cause the heartiest and stoutest service, and who, notwithstanding much carelessness or ruggedness of execution, possessed perhaps, even considered simply as a poet, the richest and most various faculty was John Cleveland, the most popular verse-writer of his own day, the most neglected of all his contemporaries ever since. Among the one hundred and sixty-one poets, from Robert of Gloucester to Sir Francis Fane, whose choicest relics furnish out Ellis’s three volumes of Specimens, the name of Cleveland does not occur. Nor is his poetry included either in Anderson’s or in Chalmers’s collection. Yet for nearly twenty years he was held to be the greatest among living English poets…. Cleveland is commonly regarded as a mere dealer in satire and invective, and as having no higher qualities than a somewhat rude force and vehemence. His prevailing fault is a straining after vigor and concentration of expression; and few of his pieces are free from a good deal of obscurity, harshness, or other disfigurement, occasioned by this habit or tendency working in association with an alert, ingenious, and fertile fancy, a neglect of and apparently a contempt for neatness of finish, and the turn for quaintness and quibbling characteristic of the school to which he belongs—for Cleveland must be considered as essentially one of the old wit poets. Most of his poems seem to have been thrown off in haste, and never to have been afterwards corrected or revised. There are, however, among them some that are not without vivacity and sprightliness; and others of his more solemn verses have all the dignity that might be expected from his prose letter to Cromwell.
A boisterous, turbulent royalist.
The Cavalier Poet. A name given to John Cleveland, at one time a favorite and successful English poet, but now almost forgotten.
Though the perusal of Cleveland’s work is likely to afford but little pleasure, there are reasons why he should not fall into utter oblivion. He was one of those men in whom lay the possibilities of more than ordinary, if not of great, achievement. The spirit of the age into which he was born was adverse to the development of his finest powers. He saw dimly,—never clearly,—that the poetic tide was setting toward wrong channels, yet he had not the force to stem it. Had kindlier influences been brought to bear upon his life, had peace instead of turmoil surrounded him in his mature years, he might have made a strong resistance to the growing flood, though he never could more than slightly have diverted it, so irresistible was its impetus…. Cleveland was probably the first English poet to make deliberate use of the dactyl and anapest,—that is, if we do not take into account the pre-Chaucerian rhymesters. Here was his opportunity of winning for himself a permanent place in literature; and had he not been turned aside by force of circumstances, those ear-catching measures that have so delighted latter-day readers and poets might have been given to the language more than a century earlier. In some of Cleveland’s political pieces is heard the trip of the anapest, and also in a rollicking poem reminiscent of the poet’s early Cambridge days. In a fantastic, impetuous lyric, “Mark Antony,” the dactyls go madly chasing one another. In form this is the precise counterpart of Scott’s famous song in the “Lady of the Lake,”—
| “Row, vassals, row for the pride of the highlands.” |
Besides his numerous satires, Cleveland wrote several fulsome panegyrics on Prince Rupert, Laud, and other leaders of the royalist party. More notable than these are his non-political verses. Though disfigured often by extravagant conceits, and not unfrequently by grossness, they are melodious and polished effusions, comparatively free from the careless disregard of metre and rhyme that spoils much of the work of Cartwright, Suckling, and other Caroline poets.
