June 20, 1613

John Cleveland,was a royalist poet, and popular during his own time. He was baptized June 20, 1613, and died, possibly homeless April 29, 1658, during the Interregnum, ignorant of course, that the family he served would soon be returned to power.

Cleveland had a style of verse that used extravagant and surprising figures of speech. Here's an example:

Be dumb you beggars of the rhyming trade,
Geld your loose wits and let your Muse be spade.
Charge not the Parish with your bastard phrase Of balm,
.....

My text defeats your art, ties Nature's tongue,
Scorns all her tinseled metaphors of pelf, 
Illustrated by nothing but herself.

As spiders travel by their bowels spun
Into a thread, and when the race is run
Wind up their journey in a living clew,
So is it with my poetry and you.

From your own essence must I first untwine,
Then twist again each panegyric line.
Reach then a soaring quill that I may write
....

This is the kind of language Dryden criticized as expressing "a thing hard and unnaturally."
The above is from "The Hecatomb  To His Mistress," as is this excerpt:

......
Thou man of mouth, that canst not name a she
Unless all Nature pay a subsidy,
Whose language is a tax, whose musk-cat verse
Voids nought but flowers for thy Muse's hearse,

.....

A hecatomb was in antiquity a "large public sacrifice" and thus the title illustrates a theme of the poem, which is the exaggerations of poets.  Only in the last century has his reputation been revived, and rightfully so.