Do you know who John Cleveland was? If you don’t, you’re not alone. John Cleveland (1613–1658) was the most popular poet in the English language in the seventeenth century. His work was so widely read that his collection of poems went through twenty editions in his time—and books were luxury items then.
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| John Cleveland |
John Cleveland was part of the most acclaimed group of writers of his time, a school called the Metaphysical Poets. Ironically, the Metaphysical Poets were best known for their seduction poems. Think Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” The Metaphysical Poets were enormously popular in the 1600s in England, but Cleveland’s work is hardly ever read these days.
What should that tell us about how we should be writing today? Well, it could tell us that just because a poet is wildly popular in the present day, it doesn’t mean that their work will last, or even that it’s good.
On the other hand, Emily Dickinson wrote about 1800 poems, only ten of which were published in her lifetime. During Emily Dickinson’s own era of the late nineteenth century, her work was known mainly to a small circle of her literati friends in the Northeast of the United States. Today her work is internationally read, appreciated, and discussed. So what should that tell us? Again, often a writer’s fame in their own lifetime is not a measure of the quality of their work. Emily Dickinson’s writing was so daring in its style and subject matter that she didn’t publish most of it while she was alive. Her work has endured precisely because it had qualities that made it difficult to put into print in her day.
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| Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) |
I take these two contrasting trajectories for a writer’s reputation as a cautionary tale. If your work is in lock step with the literary fashions of your day, that may make your writing popular for a limited time. It’s no guarantee that your work will endure, however. To my mind, the writing that lasts surprises us in its style and content, and it also resonates with the deepest human impulses, emotions, and situations—not with literary fads.
There are other reasons why Cleveland fell out of favor, and Dickinson has staying power. Cleveland’s style feels outmoded today since he often wrote in heroic couplets (ten-syllable, clinkety-clankety verses that predictably rhyme AABBCC, etc.). He was also an avid supporter of the monarch Charles I, who was beheaded in a revolution because of his insistence on the divine right of kings, so Cleveland was on the losing side of history as well. Dickinson, on the other hand, was an independent and bold woman long before that was looked upon favorably, she was an iconoclast in her religious beliefs, and she invented her own style that still feels modern, using slant rhyme and unexpected diction. Writers who are ahead of their time in their technique and ideas also stand a better chance of being read in the long run.
I don’t mean to suggest, though, that John Cleveland’s poetry is completely unworthy of readers. He’s a minor writer, to my mind, but I do enjoy a couple of his poems. I particularly like “Fuscara, or the Bee Errant,” where a bee sensually explores the exposed arms of the speaker’s beloved. When the bee alights on
The mystic figures of her hand,He tipples palmistry and dinesOn all her fortune-telling lines.
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
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