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Arthur Hugh Clough Biography

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CLOUGH,  Arthur Hugh  (1819-61). An English author. He was born in Liverpool, but when only four years old was taken by his father, a merchant, to Charleston, S. C. He returned to England, however, in 1828, and was at Rugby under Dr. Arnold, whose strenuous appeal to moral responsibility in boys probably had an unhappy effect upon Clough's temperament, naturally high strung, with a tendency to more or less morbid introspection. His Oxford career had an even more decisive influence on his life. He entered the university at the height of the "Tractarian movement," with one of whose most brilliant men, William George Ward, he was intimate. For a time he was carried away by the new current, but the reaction took him further in the opposite direction. He held a fellowship at Oriel College from 1843 to 1848, but relinquished it when it became clear to him that he could no longer subscribe to the religious doctrines involved- becoming later an examiner under the Education Department, like Matthew Arnold, with whom he had much in common. His temperament was essentially skeptical- in no mere negative sense, but in that of reverent and anxious seeking for the truth at all costs. It is this characteristic which dominates the whole of his literary work, whether verse or prose. In his three longer poems, Dipsychus, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and Amours de voyage, the analysis of character disturbed by spiritual conflict is the main interest; though he shows a perfect consciousness that the habit of self-analysis and suspense of judgment may be carried too far. After his death, which occurred on a tour in Italy, he was commemorated in one of the noblest elegies in the English language- Arnold's Thyrsis; and Lowell (whom, with Emerson, Longfellow, and other eminent men, he had met on a visit to America) expressed the feeling that he would "be thought a hundred years hence to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the age in which he lived." His Poems and Prose Remains, with letters and a memoir by F. T. Palgrave, were published together in 1869, both volumes having been previously more than once reprinted. Another memoir entitled A. H. Clough: A Monograph, appeared in 1883. Volumes of selected poems were made by Mrs. Clough in 1894, for the Golden Treasury Series, and by E. Rhys in 1896. Poems, edited by H. S. Mitford in Oxford Library of Prose and Poetry, appeared in 1910.