SOURCE: Morris, Brian and Eleanor Withington. “The Poetry of Cleveland.” In The Poems of John Cleveland, edited by Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington, pp. xv-lxxvii. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

In the following essay, Morris and Withington analyze Cleveland's poetry in the context of the English Civil War.

In his own age Cleveland was distinguished as a writer of ‘strong lines’. The two poems in H18 [a commonplace book containing eighteen of Cleveland's poems] which respectively attack and defend his ‘How the Commencement grows new’ mention this aspect of his art. John Saltmarsh writes:

Can thy strong Lines, those mighty Cartrope things be twined, and twisted into fiddle strings? 

and Robert Wilde replies:

pray that the Satyrist be in that minde that thou art below his laughing at, tis kinde; his strong lines haue not yet so thinne a twist but thou maist finde them whipcord if he list: 

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