SOURCE: Korshin, Paul J. “The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (1968): 102-37.

In the following excerpt, Korshin briefly considers Cleveland, John Denham, and Edmund Waller as neoclassical poets, then focuses on Cleveland's use of irony and satire and his contributions to neoclassical poetics.

I

The universally accepted division of seventeenth-century English poetry into schools, metaphysical or baroque and neoclassical or Augustan, presupposes the conception of literary and hence theoretical change from the intellectual bases of one prevalent poetic style to those of another, different mode of expression. In the language of literary historians transitional poetry clearly exists, though in the milieu of the mid-seventeenth century the process of evolution is gradual and consequently far less remarkable to its literary men than to modern critics. Yet through this literary gradualism, the transition from metaphysical to neoclassical English poetry involves the rejection of...