SOURCE: Kimmey, John L. “John Cleveland and the Satiric Couplet in the Restoration.” Philological Quarterly 37, no. 4 (October 1958): 410-23.

[In the following essay, Kimmey praises Cleveland's rendering of satiric couplets, contending that his talent was a combination of burlesque and formal satire, inspiring movements by his contemporaries toward both genres.]

John Cleveland's part in the development of seventeenth-century poetry has never clearly or fully been recognized by either critics or scholars, who too often have dismissed him as a freak or a fool for his incorrigible and fantastic wit. Whereas no one reads him today except as a footnote to the decline of metaphysical poetry, in his own time he was all the rage. His contemporaries ranked him among the best poets in England.¹ Aspiring wits of the 1640's and 1650's imitated his satire, borrowed his conceits, and mimicked his language in their attempts to Clevelandize as ingeniously as the master. So successful were they that a school of poetry bearing his name flourished briefly in the mid-1650's, and Clevelandism became a distinctive manner of writing which influenced significantly Restoration verse satire.

Nowhere is his contribution to that period and that genre more evident than in the couplet. For one whose cadences moved so unevenly and uncertainly despite their intermittent smoothness and exactness and whose metrical range was so limited, Cleveland had an exceptional influence upon the Restoration satiric couplet. Dryden and Butler both learned from him how to speed up, lighten, roughen, and dramatize a caustic or burlesque line.² Oldham studied his rhythm to effect its whiplash sharpness. To no other English satirist prior to 1660 could they look for such brilliant examples. Joseph Hall, Marston, and Donne were too irregular and harsh for their tastes. Wither was too flat and dull. Although Dryden mentioned Waller and Denham as his models, he could not find in their work couplets adequate for his needs. Their “turns,” their easy and pleasing meter with its liquid measures and graceful balance and antithesis would not serve for the plunging, thrusting lines of his satires which required a more virile and varied music. Certainly Oldham could find no one before him who handled the curse with such vigor and flexibility. Nor did Butler have any recent English burlesque poet to follow except Cleveland since the last important one had been John Skelton in the sixteenth century.

Although Dryden never wrote his contemplated study of English prosody, he suggested in his critical essays on the drama, heroic poetry, and satire the type of couplet proper for each of these forms. For instance, in A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) he rejected the metrical devices of Butler, and incidentally of Donne, as being too confining, trivial, and undignified for the work of satire. Favoring a smoother, tighter, and more majestic couplet which would elevate the mean manner of the genre by lofty words and numbers, he proposed uniting the splendor of the heroic poem with the venom of satire. Since satire was simply a “species” of the heroic, there was no reason why the same elegance and regularity should not be fundamental to both, why the “beautiful turns” of Waller should not be preferred to the “points of wit and quirks of epigrams” found in Cowley.³

Of course, by censuring Butler, Donne, and Cowley and lauding Waller, Dryden appears to be excluding Cleveland from the group of poets who shaped his satiric couplet. However, this essay, written almost ten years after his major satires, does not reflect the whole of his actual practice, particularly as shown in such a rugged lampoon as The Medal (1682). Nor does it completely agree with his previously expressed opinion on meter in “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684) where he speaks of wit that will shine through “the harsh cadence of a rugged line.” Within the framework of the heroic couplet he ranged from the looseness of burlesque to the roughness of invective, depending on pauseless lines, frequent enjambment, shifting caesuras, a surprising number of monosyllabic lines, and an occasional double rhyme and pyrrhic fifth foot. Without degenerating into carelessness or harshness this latitude created a pliant, pulsing line which never lost its sureness or control. Nor did it sacrifice energy for evenness, variety for strictness. When he cursed his opponents, he echoed the fierce metrical energy Cleveland displayed in his condemnation of the Scots:

But 'tis reserved! Till Heaven plague you worse,
Be objects of an epidemic curse.
First, may your brethren, to whose viler ends
Your power hath bawded, cease to count you friends,
And, prompted by the dictate of their reason,
Reproach the traitors though they hug the treason:
And may their jealousies increase and breed
Till they confine your steps beyond the Tweed:
In foreign nations may your loath'd name be
A stigmatizing brand of infamy …(4)

This curse is blunter, more monosyllabic, less rhetorical and precisely patterned than Dryden's. The half-lines are not so clearly defined or arranged in such subtle and complex designs. But the accents like Dryden's are sharp, the rhythm intense and staunchly controlled, the lines effectively divided between those with medial caesuras and those with no pauses whatsoever. Dryden tidied up Cleveland's type of formal curse by employing more balance, yet he kept the strong beat and the scornful speaking voice, the swift, keen phrasing, and the firm closure:

Those let me curse; what vengeance will they urge,
Whose ordures neither plague nor fire can purge;
Nor sharp experience can to duty bring,
Nor angry Heaven, nor a forgiving king!
In gospel-phrase their chapmen they betray;
Their shops are dens, the buyer is their prey.
The knack of trades is living on the spoil;
They boast ev'n when each other they beguile. …
All hands unite of every jarring sect;
They cheat the country first, and then infect.
They for God's cause their monarchs dare dethrone,
And they'll be sure to make his cause their own.(5)

Besides refining this slashing, vitriolic manner, Dryden adopted certain metrical tricks of Cleveland's couplets. The Civil War poet used polysyllabic words not so much for ironing out a line as for heightening a point of wit, setting off a rhyme word, slowing down the meter. One of his most outstanding examples occurs in “The King's Disguise”: “O that stenography of fate.” The main word dominates the line metrically as well as rhetorically. The same is true of the following famous verse from Part I of Absalom and Achitophel: “Before polygamy was made a sin.” Examples of this device abound in Dryden's work from such a line as “But sure thou'rt but a kilderkin of wit” in Mac Flecknoe to “A conventicle of gloomy sullen saints” in The Medal.⁶

The trick of modifying the final rhyme of a couplet with a polysyllabic adjective or adverb is another device of Cleveland's which later became popular. It either marks off the long word distinctly or leads up to it climactically and at the same time stamps out its own derision or humor in an unforgettable manner: “Thus every heteroclite part” (l. 59, p. 29); “Like leeches; thus they physically thirst” (l. 85, p. 59). Dryden depended mainly on adverbs to gain rhetorical or dramatic effect in this position: “Turn rebel and run popularly mad” (l. 336, p. 113); “Sucking for them were med'cinally good” (l. 150, p. 130). But he was not opposed to a spicy adjective placed in a sensitive position: “The vital warmth of cuckoldizing juice” (l. 339, p. 142); “An omer even of Hebronitish grain” (l. 333, p. 142).

Cleveland's rhymes did not influence Dryden so much as they did Butler, for they are more suitable for burlesque than formal satire. But Dryden handled a few polysyllabic rhymes in much the same fashion as his predecessor. Where Cleveland wrote of Charles I's disguise during his flight to the Scots in 1646,

As if thy blacks were of too faint a dye
Without the tincture of tautology,

(p. 53)

Dryden used the same type of contrast between long and short rhyme words in his ridicule of Shadwell:

Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee,
Thou last great prophet of tautology.

(ll. 29-30, p. 134)

His other polysyllabic rhymes such as “impenitence,” “anarchy,” and “prerogative” resemble in kind Cleveland's “hermaphrodite,” “phlebotomy,” and “sophisticate.” Like the latter's they finish off the couplet in much the same flamboyant fashion that the poet set in “The Rebel Scot”:

They're citizens o' th' world; they're all in all;
Scotland's a nation epidemical.

(p. 58)

Matching a monosyllabic with a polysyllabic rhyme word, Dryden achieves the same resounding conclusion:

Let Israel's foes suspect his heav'nly call,
And rashly judge his writ apocryphal.

(ll. 664-665, p. 118)

To what extent Cleveland determined Dryden's use of antithesis and balance cannot be definitely settled. But undoubtedly in his reading of the pre-Restoration poet he must have been struck by certain lines and couplets which stood out because of their polish and precision. With swiftness and rigorous clarity they expose or scorn or praise. Although they lack the case and undulation of Waller's verses, they provide the satirist with a scalpel that could prick the skin or cut to the heart in a flash: “How to be dressed, or how to lisp abroad” (l. 72, p. 58). Dryden displays the same dexterity: “How safe is treason and how sacred ill” (l. 182, p. 112). The force of Cleveland's trochaic substitution, “Geld your loose wits and let your Muse be spayed” (l. 2, p. 21), was not lost upon Dryden, who used the same type of balanced line and medial caesura: “Born for a scourge of wit, and flail of sense” (l. 89, p. 135). In a number of instances Dryden relied upon verbs and verbals to strengthen his syntactic balance supporting a contrast in thought in the fashion of Cleveland, who wrote: “Inspired within and yet possessed without” (l. 40, p. 54). Dryden's examples are compact and cutting. “Rais'd in extremes, and in extremes decried” (l. 109, p. 111) and “Promis'd a play and dwindled to a farce” (l. 182, p. 136). But what Dryden learned best was Cleveland's trick of sticking his opponent with a sharp antithesis in the second line of a couplet which was witty as well as pointed. Where Cleveland rallies the Royalists after Charles's death,

Let Christians then use otherwise this blood;
Detest the act, yet turn it to their good,

(p. 93)

Dryden demolishes Shadwell with the same kind of surprising reversal in the second line:

When wine had given him courage to blaspheme,
He curses God, but God before curs'd him.

(ll. 466-467, p. 143)

Enjambment is another aspect of Cleveland's verse which Dryden seems to have studied carefully. One type of run-on he imitated drives over for two feet into the next line until it strikes a caesura as in Cleveland's couplet:

Not all the buckets in a country quire
Shall quench my rage. A poet should be feared …

(p. 56)

Dryden, though not gaining such speed and intensity, achieves the same metrical thrust into the second verse:

Now wonder'd why so long they had obeyed
An idol monarch, which their hands had made …

(ll. 63-64, p. 110)

Pauseless lines, one right after another with no decided break either at the end or middle, are a feature of Cleveland's couplets. Where the poet spits out his venom without taking a breath,

By Scotch invasion to be made a prey
To such pigwiggin myrmidons as they,

(p. 57)

Dryden releases his malice more slowly but with the same tight binding of the lines together:

In contemplation of whose ugly scars
They curs'd the memory of civil wars.

(ll. 73-74, p. 110)

Another illustration of this device is in the following couplet where the run-on heightens the fervor of the poem by lashing the lines tensely together:

And where's the stoic can his wrath appease
To see his country sick of Pym's disease

(p. 56)

Dryden hesitates more emphatically at the end of the first line, though again his meter is very similar to Cleveland's in the way in which it rushes along:

And pity never ceases to be shown
To him who makes the people's wrongs his own.

(ll. 725-726, p. 118)

One further kind of enjambment Cleveland used and Dryden echoed was that in which the caesura comes toward the end of the first line:

But that there's charm in verse, I would not quote
The name of Scot without an antidote.

(p. 57)

Though not binding the couplet smoothly, this tends to accelerate the second line and catapult it to a conclusion so that the rhymes clap sharply. Dryden followed the procedure without the same hurrying and pushing of the words along to the completion of the couplet:

But short shall be his reign: his rigid yoke
And tyrant pow'r will puny sects provoke.

(ll. 302-303, p. 132)

Still another device Cleveland employed in his work that became an important part of Restoration verse satire was anti-climax or dramatic surprise at the conclusion of the couplet. Climbing toward a peak of praise, the lines unexpectedly turn in a new direction to effect ridicule, scorn, or humor. In most cases the pivotal point is the tag end of the second line as in this attack on the trimmer John Williams, Archbishop of York:

These speak him not; but if you'll name him right,
Call him Religion's Hermaphrodite.

(p. 70)

The poet inflates the object of his satire in the first verse, or at least points toward such inflation, in order to deflate more devastatingly in the second. Pope, of course, perfected the technique in The Rape of the Lock, where it is so well suited to the ridicule of the affected and the pretentious:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.(7)

Cleveland, though not so subtle, could still perform the trick with great gusto:

In fine the name of Rupert thunders so,
Kimbolton's but a rumbling wheelbarrow.

(p. 67)

One of the first to introduce such an ironic reversal into the heroic couplet, he paved the way for the dramatic use of it by Dryden in his satirical portraits:⁸

The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But She never deviates into sense.

(ll. 19-20, p. 134)

Actually the one quality of Cleveland's numbers that affected Dryden the most, and, as Mark Van Doren notes, gave him his “metrical cue on more than one occasion” is their “momentous directness”; that is, their rapidity, vigor, and terseness.⁹ They can sum up, scorn, contrast, and curse with remarkable audacity. Part of this is due to the placing of adjectives and adverbs before the rhyme words, to the stamping out of tart balance and antithesis, and to the controlled running-on. But even more important is the pauseless line which Cleveland resorted to again and again to whip his verses into shape, to make them charge or sprint or leap forward:

O that I could vote myself a poet

(l. 1, p. 62)

Encountering with a brother of the cloth

(l. 9, p. 43)

Religion for their seamstress and their cook

(l. 104, p. 59)

Dryden fired the same kind of rapid, ringing line on several occasions:

O that my pow'r to saving were confin'd

(l. 999, p. 122)

Repelling from his breast the raging god

(l. 137, p. 136)

Impoverish'd and depriv'd of all command

(l. 94, p. 110)

It was not only directness that Cleveland taught the author of The Medal and Mac Flecknoe; it was also movement, the fast, piercing movement of political satire that never wavered or lost its momentum. Dryden may have decried Cleveland's fanciful wit as hard and unnatural, but he showed in his criticism of him how meticulously he had read the great wit of the Civil War period. In his satiric couplets he showed how much he had learned from him.

Oldham like Dryden was no casual reader and imitator of Cleveland. He borrowed conceits, motifs, and words liberally, for in the savage denunciation of the satirist he found the kind of political invective he himself was trying to express.¹⁰ However, it is in the vigorous music of his couplets that Cleveland's influence can best be detected. His Satyrs upon the Jesuits (1681) carries to an extreme the driving, slashing meter Cleveland had introduced in his political satires. Oldham employed the same tight monosyllabic line to gain speed and intensity, the same strong accents at the beginning of a line to thrust it forward, the same heavy caesuras for emphasis. Also his use of exclamation points and polysyllabic rhymes resembles his precursor's in couplet after couplet. In fact, if you place many verses of each poet side by side without designating their authors, it is difficult to distinguish them from a metrical standpoint. The only difference occurs in long passages where Cleveland displays a more formal and finished couplet. He also exercises more control over his half-line units and is careful to make the most effective use of his balance and antithesis. He never allows his passion to overcome his form.

A couplet which exhibits many of the characteristics of Cleveland's meter found in Oldham is the violent one from “The Rebel Scot”:

Scots are like witches; do but whet your pen,
Scratch till the blood come, they'll not hurt you then.

(p. 57)

Oldham's couplet similar to this has the same dramatic trochaic foot at the beginning of each line, the same marked pauses, and the same predominance of monosyllables to hammer out sharply the fierceness of the satire. The lines are hurried along with almost the same swiftness:

Strike, and avenge, let impious Atheists say,
Chance guides the World, and has usurp'd thy Sway.(11)

They lack, of course, Cleveland's precision in dividing up his verses into two firm halves, his beginning each unit after the caesura with a heavy accent to gain greater emphasis, and his skillful grouping of strong stresses as in “the blood come.” But the resemblance between the two couplets shows clearly that Oldham had studied closely the work of the most popular political satirist before the Restoration and had attempted to model his satiric meter on it.

There are other striking examples of the metrical tricks he learned from Cleveland. For instance, the rhyming of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words by setting off the former with a pause is certainly a distinct feature of Cleveland's poems he could not fail to observe. The device heightens the tag end of the second verse of the couplet either for the sake of humor or vituperation. Cleveland most frequently used the contrast of rhyme words for the sake of ridicule:

They fear the giblets of his train, they fear
Even his dog, that four-legged cavalier.

(p. 65)

Oldham stressed the rhyme of the second verse for the sake of underlining his anger and indignation:

Denies with Oaths the Fact, until it be
Less Guilt to own it than the Perjury.

(p. 29)

Again he is not as effective as Cleveland because of his inept use of the caesura in the second line and his failure to place the pause closer to the end of the line in the first verse. But in punctuating lines with exclamation points he is just as successful as Cleveland, who inserts a strong medial pause in the first line of his satire on Smectymnuus: “Smectymnuus! The goblin makes me start!” Oldham belittles the Jesuits in the same dramatic fashion: “Room for the Martyr'd Saints! Behold they come!” (p. 30) He approximates Cleveland's line “Ring the bells backward! I am all on fire” (l. 5, p. 56) with “How goodly was the Sight! How fine the Show” (p. 14), another example of strong pauses to intensify the emotion of the line.

Parallel construction in order to stress a point was a much more common practice with Oldham than Cleveland. His type of satire, depending to a greater extent on direct denunciation rather than on witty sallies, had need of such a rhetorical device. However, it also plays a prominent part in Cleveland's “The Scots Apostacy” where he curses the Scots in no uncertain terms:

Let not the sun afford one gentle ray
To give you comfort of a summer's day …
Let provoked princes send them all to you:
Your state a chaos be where not the Law.

(p. 61)

Oldham scourges the Jesuits with the same kind of parallel construction and monosyllabic persistence. Both poets break their lines for the most part strongly in the middle with Cleveland tending toward the more rapid, pauseless line:

Let them with Sackcloth discipline their Skins
And scourge them for their Madness, and their Sins,
Let pining Anchorets in Grottos starve,
Who from the Liberties of Nature swerve.

(p. 45)

At times Oldham's couplets resemble Cleveland's so closely in structure that he seems to be deliberately copying them. For instance, the latter's praise of Prince Rupert vibrates with a rhetorical bravado that certainly Oldham must have noted:

Go on, brave Prince, and make the world confess
Thou art the greater world and that the less.

(p. 67)

For his imitation of it is quite exact even to the point of the antithesis in the second line broken solidly in the middle by a caesura:

Go on, ye mighty Champions of our Cause,
Maintain our Party, and subdue our Foes.

(p. 36)

But the clearest evidence of borrowing involves Cleveland's Cain-Scot distich, his most famous and widely celebrated couplet with its clever identification of Cain and the Scots and its ironic balance and antithesis:

Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;
Not forced him wander but confined him home!

(p. 58)

Oldham attempts to reproduce this couplet but his imitation fails because of the lack of a witty conceit and an absence of clear, concise antithesis in the second line upon which the whole couplet must turn:

Had he [Cain] been Jesuit, had he put on
Their Savage Cruelty; the rest had gone.

(p. 26)

While Cleveland's satiric couplets were examined meticulously by Dryden and Oldham, his burlesque meter was not entirely neglected in the Restoration. Only Butler, however, benefited from it directly, for the doggerel that accompanied the comic genre received limited recognition by the poets, who objected to the manner in which the four-foot line and the humorous rhymes debased the dignity of true poetry and put it on a level with popular verse. Puttenham had set the pattern for the rejection in The Art of English Poesy (1589) where he scorned Skelton for his “short distaunces and short measures, pleasing onely the popular care” and his “rude” rhymes that were not “even, just and melodius.”¹² Dryden, though admiring Hudibras for its great good sense, decried the undignified jocularity of the verse because of its double and triple rhymes that popped up too quickly and its octosyllabic line that provided no opportunity for medial caesuras and variation of feet and pause. It was like playing tennis constantly at the net with short strokes. Furthermore, the meter represented as much a degrading of the true, lofty, satiric expression as that of Donne's with its discord, ellipsis and broken lines.¹³

The most complete and revealing description of the burlesque couplet in the seventeenth century was written by an anonymous author in 1698 as part of the “Advertisement” to his Hudibrastic poem Pendragen; or, The Carpet Knight. Besides the short line and the double and triple rhymes he enumerated other “laws of Burlesque,” such as changing the accent for the sake of rhyme, altering pronunciation, omitting consonants, borrowing from all languages, ending lines with prepositions, splitting a word between two lines, employing too many monosyllables on some occasions and too many line-filling words on others, and finally eschewing all refining and polishing.¹⁴ Obviously the critic was thinking of Butler, for no other poet marshalled all of these devices together so imposingly in one poem. He became notorious for them although they were not all of his own invention. Just as he found a burlesque approach to a subject, a burlesque language and wit displayed in Cleveland's work, so did he find there a couplet appropriate for his material.

While Cleveland never used the four-foot line, he exhibits certain other features prominent in burlesque meter: amusing multiple rhymes, wrenched accents, convenient mispronunciations, monosyllabic lines as well as those with words from four to seven syllables long, and elision In other words, his poems contain most of the elements of burlesque doggerel which the anonymous critic pointed out as present in Hudibras. Only the division of words between lines and the use of triple rhymes are missing. Of course, Cleveland does not equal Butler's varied and clever rhymes, employ Latin and foreign terms so frequently and amusingly, or achieve the surprise and the ludicrous shock he springs upon the reader time after time. Yet it is evident that Butler borrowed from his friend with respect to meter just as he did with respect to language and imagery.

The most obvious device he borrowed was his rhyme, which he considered a jest all by itself. Cleveland showed him how to clown and tease with clever tag words appropriate for closing a couplet with zest:

For man and wife make one right
Canonical hermaphrodite.

(p. 28)

Faith, cry St. George! Let them go to 't and stickle
Whether a conclave or a conventicle.

(p. 48)

Wishing the world had but one general neck,
His glutton blade might have found game in Smec.

(p. 48)

Although he used the shorter line and placed the rhymes in different contexts, Butler's imitations are unmistakable:

In Soul and Body two unite,
To Make up one Hermaphrodite.
He us'd to lay about and stickle,
Like Ram, or Bull at Conventicle.
The Hand (k) erchief about the neck
(Canonical Crabat of Smeck …(15)

The first couplet is part of a whole passage which he took over from Cleveland almost verbatim. Its comic impact stems from the long formidable word so incongruous yet so apt for the ridicule of the lovers. In the other two borrowed sets of rhyme the slight wrench of the polysyllabic word in the second line of the second couplet and the slang term “Smec” that Cleveland coined both provide humorous rhyming appropriate to burlesque.

Besides exaggerated rhymes Butler found in Cleveland's work certain other methods for lightening, twisting, and perverting his tag ends. One was the omission of consonants or vowels and the insertion of apostrophes. The device was not original with Cleveland, but he exploited it more extensively than earlier verse satirist:

The stage in a triumphant sort
Now e'en John Lilburn take 'em for 't!

(p. 86)

Indulging in this practice far more regularly and with more hilarious results, Butler improved upon the technique of his friend, using the same rhyme combinations:

And Men as often dangled for 't,
And yet will never leave the Sport.

(p. 213)

The shorter line, the quicker return of the rhyme, and the more vivid application of elision all tend to make such a device stand out more conspicuously in Hudibras.

The wrenching of the accent of a word for the sake of rhyme is still another trick which became a stock-in-trade of the burlesque poet and which Cleveland and the Elizabethan satirists before him had employed. These early poets, however, used it for the purpose of roughness rather than ridicule, for jarring the nerves rather than for tickling the funny bone. Cleveland's practice lay between the two extremes:

… call her the squared circle; say
She is the very rule of Algebra.

(p. 24)

Butler changed the accent more drastically and comically, deliberately putting together words which needed to be twisted in order to rhyme. But he often plucked the original idea from his friend's couplets:

And wisely tell what hour o' th' day
The Clock doth strike, by Algebra.

(p. 6)

One other outstanding device of the burlesque couplet also appears in Cleveland's poems and undoubtedly influenced Butler. It is the use of high-sounding bombast for rhyme. Here Cleveland with his clever, ludicrous language can be said to have a direct effect upon Butler:

(So by an abbey's skeleton of late
I heard an echo supererogate …

(p. 76)

Appearing in the octosyllabic line, this type of word achieves far more fantastic and funny results, spreading its bulk like a sawdust monster:

That some occult design doth lie
In bloody Cynarctomachy.

(p. 22)

Some of Cleveland's words for this purpose are “periphrasis,” “impropriate,” “concorporate,” and “superinstitute.” Butler relied on the same kind of verbosity with such terms as “vitilitigation,” “nuncheons,” and “prevaricate,” terms which sound so big and mean so little. They not only provide for the necessary double and off-rhymes of burlesque but also add witty surprise and absurdity to the verses because of their position in the couplet. More ingeniously than any other aspect of a burlesque poem, such roguish rhymes create the tempo of the style and establish that incongruity between the expression and the content which is the essence of such poetry. No other element of the genre calls attention to itself so vividly and characterizes the type of poetry so dramatically.

Hence, it is clear that Cleveland's meter pointed ahead in two different directions. At the end of one line of influence lay such satires as The Medal and Absalom and Achitophel with their swift, stinging half-lines pivoting on balance and antithesis, incisive pauses, and crisp rhymes all tending toward a firm but resilient cadence. At the end of the other line lay the burlesque Hudibras with its tumbling rhythms, clownish rhymes, and tricky elisions all leading to loose and at times reckless numbers. No two types of meter could be farther apart or less likely to be practiced by the same poet.

In Cleveland's work, however, they function side by side, for while on the one hand he was refining his couplet in accordance with the standards of Waller and Denham, on the other hand he was still bound to the Elizabethan convention of roughness. Symmetrical polysyllabic lines that divide neatly in the middle and stop sharply at the end are surrounded by dissonant monosyllables, distorted accents, and careless verses that avoid balance or closure. From the standpoint of satiric meter, then, his poems are a mixture of the old discords and the new harmonies and demonstrate forcibly the metrical uncertainty that existed at mid-century before the rough elements burst into burlesque and those composing smoothness eased their way into formal satire. Although clearly not an original or artistic handler of the heroic couplet in long passages or whole poems, he was a successful innovator within the scope of individual lines and couplets, one from whom the Restoration poets learned more than they realized and borrowed more than they were willing to acknowledge.

Notes

1. Henry B[elayse], wrote in An English Traveler's First Curiosity (1657): “What nation can show more refined wits … our Shakespear, our Beaumont, our Fletcher, our Dunn, our Randol, our Crashaw, our Cleveland, our Sidney, our Bacon …” His. MSS Comm., Report of MSS in Various Collections, ii (London, 1903), 194. For an account of Cleveland's reputation during the seventeenth century see Arthur H. Nethercot, “The Reputation of the ‘Metaphysical Poets’ during the Seventeenth Century,” JEGP, xxiii (1924), 178-181. Twenty-nine editions of his poetry were published from 1647 to 1699.

2. For evidence of Dryden's close reading of Cleveland see his criticism of him in An Essay on Dramatic Poesie (1668), Essays of John Dryden, ed. by W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), i, 52-53. John Aubrey mentions the friendship between Cleveland and Butler in Brief Lives, ed. by Oliver Lawson Dick (London, 1950), p. 46.

3. Essays of John Dryden, ii. 105-110.

4. Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. by George Saintsbury, iii (Oxford, 1921), 61. All references to Cleveland's poems are from this edition.

5. The Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed. by George R. Noyes (Boston, 1909), ll. 187-194 and ll. 197-200, p. 130. All references to Dryden's poems are from this edition.

6. In the Dunciad polysyllabic words are Pope's favorite instrument for producing withering contempt. Geoffrey Tillotson notes this characteristic of Pope's verse in On the Poetry of Pope, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1950), pp. 139-140.

7. The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. by Henry W. Boynton (Boston, 1903), Canto 3, ll. 7-8, p. 93.

8. For a discussion of the subtle way in which Dryden uses this “dramatic tension” in his satirical portraits see Wallace Cable Brown, The Triumph of Form (Chapel Hill, 1948), pp. 27-28.

9. Mark Van Doren, John Dryden: A Study of his Poetry (New York, 1946), p. 72.

10. Weldon M. Williams discusses Cleveland's influence upon Oldham, exclusive of the couplet, in “The Influence of Ben Jonson's Catiline upon John Oldham's Satyrs upon the Jesuits,” ELH, xi (March, 1944), 58-60. He believes that the influence is mainly confined to the Prolog and the second Satyr; however, all through the poem the language, conceits, and meter echo Cleveland.

11. The Works of John Oldham, Together with his Remains (London, 1722), i, 16. All references to Oldham's poem are from this edition.

12. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. by G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), ii, 87.

13. Essays of John Dryden, ii, 105-106.

14. This “Advertisement” is quoted by Richmond P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), pp. 34-35.

15. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. by A. R., Waller (Cambridge, Eng.), p. 215, p. 39, p. 89. All following references are from this edition.