Born in England; educated at Oxford, where he won distinction by his proficiency in Latin and Greek, and by his English poetry. Want of means forced him to leave the university in 1674, and he soon secured employment as an usher at the free school in Croydon, Surrey. The first of his published poems was a Pindaric ode, on the death of his friend, Richard Morwent; it is rich in comparisons, and shows a tenderness in strong contrast with the fierce satire of his later works. He continued to cultivate poetry as a relief from the drudgery of “beating Greek and Latin for his life,” as he describes it; and some of his MS. poems attracted the notice of the reigning London wits, sir Charles Sedley, the earl of Dorset, and the earl of Rochester, who paid him a visit at Croydon. By their influence he was made tutor to the sons of sir Edward Thurlow, with whom he lived till 1680. At this time he was engaged upon his “Satires upon the Jesuits,” which appeared in 1679, when the excitement in regard to the so-called “Popish plot” was at its height. They are full of bitterness and Protestant rancor, and gained for Oldham a high reputation.
Personal
His person was tall and thin, which was much owing to a consumptive complaint, but was greatly increased by study; his face was long, his nose prominent, his aspect unpromising, but satire was in his eye.
General
| Farewell, too little and too lately known, | |
| Whom I began to think and call my own; | |
| For sure our Souls were near ally’d; and thine | |
| Cast in the same Poetick mould with mine. | |
| One common Note on either Lyre did strike, | |
| And Knaves and Fools we both abhorr’d alike; | |
* * * * * | |
| Thy generous fruits, though gather’d e’re their prime | |
| Still shew’d a quickness; and maturing time | |
| But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rhime. | |
| Once more, hail and farewel; farewel you young, | |
| But ah! too short, Marcellus of our Tongue; | |
| Thy Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound; | |
| But Fate and gloomy Night encompass thee around. |
| Inspir’d above, and could command each Passion, | |
| Had all the Wit without the Affectation. | |
| A Calm of Nature still possest his Soul, | |
| No canker’d envy did his Breast controul: | |
| Modest as Virgins that have never known | |
| The jilting Breeding of the nauseous Town; | |
| And easie as his Numbers that sublime | |
| His lofty Strains, and beautifie his Rhime. |
Oldham is a very indelicate writer: he has strong rage, but it is too much like Billingsgate.
He appears to have been no enemy to the fashionable vices of this reign; and as he was of a very different turn from his father, the character of the old parson, at the end of his works, is supposed to have been designed for him. It is perhaps the most extravagant caricature that ever was drawn, and is incomparably more outré than the Menalcas of Bruyere.
He is spirited and pointed; but his versification is too negligent, and his subjects temporary.
I have been looking over the poems of Oldham, which are now little read. I have never seen the book in any private library in this country; and yet a poet whom Dryden warmly commended, and from whom Pope and Swift and Johnson did not disdain to borrow, cannot be entirely unworthy of attention in an age which has produced so many eminent poets as that in which we live…. Although Oldham in his lifetime achieved his fame by what he wrote as a satirist, his principal talent as a poet was not for satire. His odes show that he possessed a genuine poetic enthusiasm, which appears through all his negligence of versification and diction, and often finds expression in majestic imagery and flowing numbers. He is no artist in his vocation. Dryden is our witness that he had not well learned “the numbers of his native tongue.” He has none of those happy turns of thought and expression which the practiced and expert author attains by skilful search or resolute waiting: what he has, came to him in the glow of rapid composition; and these so often that few poets can boast of so illustrious a train of imitators. His rhymes are marvellously bad: indeed, it is often amusing to see what distant resemblances of sound he is content to accept as substitutes for rhymes.
The satires of Oldham are distressing to read; the author has no belief in the better part of human nature; he is cynical and bitter to the extreme, and he strikes, not for a party, like Marvell, but wildly, against the world. Oldham is the Ajax among our satirists, and his own contemporaries, not easily moved by personal characteristics, were touched by his strange cold frenzy, his honourable isolation, and his early death. Dryden seems to have been genuinely distressed at the fate of a young man whose personal acquaintance he had but lately formed, and whose work had a character particularly attractive to him. Oldham’s versification is better than that of Marvell, in his satires, but still rugged; as Dryden observed, his prosody needed mellowing.
The contemporary of Dryden who approached him most nearly in satiric force, and, generally speaking, in the borderland between poetry and prose, was John Oldham…. Oldham’s talent, depending upon masculine sense and vigour of expression rather than upon the more ethereal graces of poetry, was of the kind to expand and mellow by age and practice. Had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have left a name conspicuous in English literature. As it is, he can only be regarded as a bright satellite revolving at a respectful distance around the all-illumining orb of Dryden.
Oldham’s productions deserve more notice than they have received. Their own original power is notable. Pope, and perhaps other of our chief eighteenth-century poets, were under important literary obligations to their author…. Whether or no the Pindaric dedicated by Oldham “to the memory of my dear friend, Mr. Charles Morwent,” in date of composition preceded his most celebrated “Satires,” it must be described as the most finished product of his genius, and as entitled to no mean place in English “In Memoriam” poetry. Cowley is evidently the master followed in this ode…. While in “original” satire Oldham cannot be said to have reached the length to which he was desirous of climbing, he is memorable in our poetic literature as one of the predecessors of Pope in the “imitative” or adapting species of satirical and didactic verse.
