Rupert Christiansen

The thinking man’s poet

‘The most intellectual British poet of the 19th century’ is Anthony Kenny’s judgment of Arthur Hugh Clough — a tribute which implies the absence of Tennysonian musi- cality in his verse as well as a prescient understanding of contemporary philosophical and scientific issues that far exceeds Browning’s or Arnold’s.

Kenny’s study of this still underrated figure takes the refreshingly old-fashioned form of a ‘life and works’. Biographically, it has no sensational revelations to offer, and, in terms of fact, it doesn’t substantially advance on the mid-20th-century researches of Katherine Chorley and R.K. Biswas. But Kenny has been thinking about Clough for over a quarter of a century, and it shows. He has already published two books on the subject — an edition of Clough’s youthful diaries and a monograph comparing his religious verse to that of Hopkins — and here his long-matured, gracefully modulated wisdom pays dividends. The result is a warmly sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of a complex character whose sensibility can without blather be described as edgily modern.

The conventional view of Clough is still taken from Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, where he makes a passing appearance as an emasculated figure running errands for Florence Nightingale, his poetic genius ruined by the prickings of an over-sensitive conscience. Clough did indeed die at the age of 42, exhausted and in some respects disappointed. But, as Kenny shows, his fate wasn’t the result of weakness or vacillation so much as stubborn independence of mind: he was the victim only of his wilful refusal to bow to the values of early Victorian society.

Two themes dominate Clough’s life and poetry. One was his era’s loss of religious faith — a crisis through which he stood in the vanguard. From the militant liberalism of Arnold’s Rugby he moved to a Tractarian Oxford that was rank with odium theologicum.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in