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...