Arthur Hugh Clough

From Philosopedia

Clough, Arthur Hugh (1 January 1819 - 13 November 1861)

An English poet, Clough (pronounced CLUFF) was born in Liverpool of a father one biographer described as an "intermittently unsuccessful cotton merchant from the North Wales landed gentry" and notes that his mother was more solidly middle-class. The family moved to Charleston, S. C., in 1822, returning briefly in 1828 to enroll Arthur in an English school, and in 1829 he entered Rugby, perhaps the most important independent school in nineteenth-century England, according to Glenn Everett of the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Thomas Arnold was Headmaster of Rugby and became like a surrogate father for Clough's own parents were in America. at the age of 15 Clough was reading Niebuhr and Schleiermacher in German. Although raised as an Evangelical, he renounced his childhood beliefs and experienced the Tractarian controversy. Radical in his politics as well as religion, he supported the revolution of 1848, participated in Mazzini's republic, got trapped in Rome when it fell to the French, and returned to London to become principal of the Unitarian University Hall and professor of English at University College. He left the Unitarians in 1852, finding they had become as rigid in their way as the Anglicans were. He traveled to Boston, hoping to obtain a position at Harvard, and talked with Emerson, but he returned to England and took a job with the Education Office (1853).

He married Blanche Smith, who was Florence Nightingale's cousin.

He was a skeptic and was somewhat cynical. He has been said to be closer in spirit to the 10th than to the 19th century. He wrote Blasting the Rock of Ages (published in 1925).

His poetry, including “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” “Dypsichus,” and “Mari Magno,” reveal not only his doubts about religion but also about himself.

On an 1852 trip to the United States, he gained the friendship of Emerson and Longfellow. Clough is the "Thyrsis" of Matthew Arnold’s “Monody.”

Leslie Stephens has said of Clough,

• He never became bitter against the Church of his childhood, but he came to regard its dogmas as imperfect and untenable.

According to Joseph McCabe, Clough

• wavered a little, as poets do, but in his final declaration on religion he is practically agnostic, not Unitarian, with a thin lingering shade of theism or pantheism.

Throughout the '50s he was at work on a translation of Plutarch's Lives (1859) and a large poem, "Mari Magno," with a structure like the Canterbury Tales. He died in Florence, November 13, 1861, at the age of only 42, having contracted malaria on a visit to Italy in 1861. Years later Matthew Arnold composed "Thyrsis" in Clough's memory.

{BDF; CE; GS; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI}