John Cleveland

John Cleveland

John Cleveland (born June 1613 in Loughborough , Leicestershire , † April 29, 1658 ) was an English poet .

Life

Cleveland was born in Loughborough in 1613 as the son of a school and church servant. In 1621 the family moved to Hinckley , where John attended Grammar School. On September 4, 1627, he enrolled at Christ's College , Cambridge . There he achieved the BA degree in 1631 and the MA degree in 1635. He then remained until 1642 as a lecturer in rhetoric at this college; some Latin speeches from this period have been preserved. But he also dealt with law and natural sciences . In the political turmoil of the time, Cleveland sided with the king and was a staunch opponent of the Puritans and Parliament. In 1638 and 1641 his poems appeared for the first time in collections edited by the university. In 1642/43 Cleveland went to Oxford , where he stayed at St John's College until 1645 and was still productive. In February 1645 Cleveland lost his job at Oxford. Shortly thereafter, the royal army placed him in the garrison of Newark-on-Trent . The city was besieged by the Scots and eventually capitulated. His whereabouts for the next nine years are unclear. As a well-known supporter of the defeated royalists and without an income, he was probably initially on the run and dependent on the support of other royalists. In 1655 Cleveland was arrested in Norwich . He testified that he had come to Norwich from London a year earlier. After about three months in prison, he wrote a pardon to Oliver Cromwell , whereupon he was released and probably went to London. He died of a febrile illness the following year.

plant

Cleveland began writing poetry in Cambridge. In addition to love poems, he wrote eulogies and political satires - both in prose and in verse. His first book, The Character of a London Diurnall , appeared in 1644 , a mockery of a kind of forerunner of modern newspapers that was published in London and represented the political unrest of the time from the point of view of parliamentarians. Cleveland then wrote two more satirical prose texts: one about officials confiscating property from nobles, and one about the authors of the diurnals , the newspapers.

style

Cleveland often uses unusual language images, so-called conceits, in his poems . These are typical of metaphysical poetry , to which his poetry can be counted. Typical for him is the quick succession of different, z. Sometimes unexpected comparisons, which also leads to catachheses . Other linguistic means are striking poem beginnings and the use of unusual, long words. The lines of a pair of rhymes often together form a statement of epigram-like conciseness and irony. An example of this from the poem "The Rebel Scot":

Had Cain been Scot , God would have chang'd his doome,
Not forc'd him wander, but confin'd him home.

(Had Cain been a Scot, God would have condemned him differently: He would have forced him
not to wander but to stay at home.)

In its satires, Cleveland attacks those who attack the monarchy, the church, the universities or the mainstream society. In doing so, he shows wit and ingenuity, but also does not shy away from exaggeration and polemics. He attacked, which was otherwise rare at the time, also individual people, such as B. Oliver Cromwell.

Edition history

No collection of his poems has survived that Cleveland himself worked on. Again and again new pirated prints appeared , in which different and different numbers of poems are presented as the work of Cleveland. Therefore, the real authorship has not yet been clarified in every case. For example, the volume John Cleveland Revived , published a year after his death, contains 37 poems, two of which are actually from Cleveland.

At least 25 editions of his poems appeared between 1647 and 1687. From this multitude it can be seen that Cleveland was one of the most widely read poets of his time during his lifetime. Even after that, his fame continued for several decades. However, John Dryden sharply criticized Cleveland in a comparison with John Donne: The latter gave the reader "deep thoughts in simple language", while the latter gave "simple thoughts in absurd words". For Samuel Johnson , Cleveland's work was a prime example of the “Conceits” of metaphysical poets that he vilified. When a scientific interest in his work arose in the 20th century, research focused on the political poems. Overall, his work is not counted among the first-rate English poetry today, but its importance for the history of satire and political literature is recognized.

Works

Since a listing of the unauthorized poetry collections does not make sense, here only the prose texts authorized by Cleveland and a modern, critical poem edition:

• The Character of a London Diurnall . Oxford: Lichfield 1644.
• The Character of a Country Committee-man, with the Earmark of a Sequestrator . London 1649.
• The character of a diurnal maker . London 1654.
• The Poems of John Cleveland . ed. by Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1967.

source

Daniel P. Jaeckle: John Cleveland . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 126, ed. v. M. Thomas Hester. Detroit: Gale 1993, pp. 62-70.