Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough (January 1, 1819 – November 13, 1861) was an English poet, and the brother of Anne Jemima Clough.

Writings

Shortly before he left Oxford, in the stress of the Irish potato famine, Clough wrote an ethical pamphlet addressed to the undergraduates, with the title, A Consideration of Objections against the Retrenchment Association at Oxford (1847). His Homeric pastoral The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosicli, afterwards rechristened Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), was inspired by a long vacation after he had given up his tutorship, and is full of socialism, reading-party humours and Scottish scenery. Ambarvalia (1849), published jointly with his friend Thomas Burbidge, contains shorter poems of various dates from 1840, or earlier, onwards. Amours de Voyage, a novel in verse, was written at Rome in 1849; Dipsychus, a rather amorphous satire, at Venice in 1850; and the idylls which make up Man Magno, or Tales on Board, in 1861. A few lyric and elegiac pieces, later in date than the Ambarvalia, complete the tale of Clough's poetry. His only considerable enterprise in prose was a revision of the 17th century translation of Plutarch by John Dryden and others, which occupied him from 1852, and was published as Plutarch's Lives (1859).

Related Topics:
Irish potato famine - 1847 - Homer - 1848 - Socialism - Thomas Burbidge - 1840 - Rome - 1849 - Venice - 1850 - 1861 - 17th century - Plutarch - John Dryden - 1852 - 1859

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No part of Clough's life was wholly given up to poetry, and he probably had not the gift of detachment necessary to produce great literature in the intervals of other occupations. He wrote but little, and even of that little there is a good deal which does not aim at the highest seriousness. He never became a great craftsman. A few of his best lyrics have a strength of melody to match their depth of thought, but much of what he left consists of rich ore too imperfectly fused to make a splendid or permanent possession. Nevertheless, he is rightly regarded, like his friend Matthew Arnold, as one of the most typical English poets of the middle of the 19th century. His critical instincts and strong ethical temper brought him athwart the popular ideals of his day both in conduct and religion. His verse has upon it the melancholy and the perplexity of an age of transition. He is a sceptic who by nature should have been with the believers. He stands between two worlds, watching one crumble behind him, and only able to look forward by the sternest exercise of faith to the reconstruction that lies ahead in. the other. On the technical side, Clough's work is interesting to students of metre, owing to the experiments which he made, in the Bothie and elsewhere, with English hexameters and other types of verse formed upon classical models.

Related Topics:
19th century - Metre - Hexameter

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Clough's Poems were collected, with a short memoir by F.T. Palgrave, in 1862; and his Letters and Remains, with a longer memoir, were privately printed in 1865. Both volumes were published together in 1869 and have been reprinted more than once. Another memoir is Arthur Hugh Clough: A Monograph (1883), by S. Waddington. Selections from the poems were made by Mrs Clough for the Golden Treasury series in 1894, and by E. Rhys in 1896.

Related Topics:
F.T. Palgrave - 1862 - 1865 - 1869 - 1883 - S. Waddington - ''Golden Treasury'' - 1894 - E. Rhys - 1896

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