Instinct and Hesitation in the Work of Arthur Hugh Clough

The processes of composition and revision put impulse and inspiration into contact with calm reflection in a way that is continuous with the other kinds of human activity Clough describes in his poems—including Dipsychus and The Bothie—where instinct and hesitation have their competing advantages and exert their rival claims. This chapter explores the drafts of Clough’s poems, many of which were heavily revised and remained incomplete at the time of his death. It shows that revision is not solely a technical requirement for Clough; understood more broadly as an ongoing process of self-checking and self-correction, it is a moral requirement in leading a responsible, virtuous life.

Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness

The poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough has tended to be read in dialogue with the writings of his friend and critic, Matthew Arnold. This essay explores how bringing Clough’s work into conversation with that of a very different friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, offers to cast his intellectual affinities and poetic technique in a new light. Interweaving close readings of Clough’s verse with detailed attention to the essays he is known to have read and admired, I trace how Clough adapts and revises Emerson’s critique of ‘knowingness’. Beginning by tracing the history of this term in nineteenth-century literature and culture, I argue that Clough’s Dipsychus shapes an Emersonian ethic and aesthetic of encounter as an alternative to complacent and proprietorial forms of knowing. Turning to the rest of Clough’s oeuvre, especially Amours de Voyage, I then consider how fantasies of the future are central to what it means to be knowing about oneself, and examine how Clough applies poetic pressure to Emerson’s conviction that ‘A man … never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going’.

Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances

Although many historical narratives of the Risorgimento and early Italian constitutional monarchy view Italy as a nation-state unable to consolidate itself against political division and regional diversity, Italian political culture’s cultivation of a sense of internal fragmentation and powerlessness also constituted part of the Risorgimento’s ideological content and Italy’s national identity. Risorgimento culture’s oppositionalism also infiltrated British reaction to Italian politics. Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s eyewitness Athenaeum correspondence, collected as Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861), develops politicised familial metaphors for unification and international alliance that empower and transform Italy through political solidarity. By contrast, texts by D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Jenkin and Arthur Hugh Clough propose more sceptical familial and romantic metaphors for Risorgimento Italy, revealing disillusioned and hesitant attitudes toward Italy in relation to its neighbouring powers, including France, Austria and Great Britain.

Close encounters of the third kind: Hamo Thornycroft’s The Mower and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’

This chapter applies the idea of a non-hierarchical, creative exchange of meaning to Hamo Thornycroft’s 1884 sculpture of The Mower, and its accompanying epigraph from Matthew Arnold’s 1866 elegy for the poet Arthur Hugh Clough: ‘Thyrsis’. The chapter argues that sculpture and epigraph, taken together, constitute a third inter-medial artwork in which the compromised relationship between the aesthetic act and the desire to apprehend the ‘real’ is manifested through a complex series of textual and, more importantly, genre citations – including classicism, naturalism, realism, pastoral elegy and Romantic lyric. These coalesce and interrogate each other in this most ‘realistic’ and ‘democratic’ of Thornycroft’s sculptures to date, establishing a competitive and a co-relational dialogue that is enacted on and by the body of the artwork. Placed in the context of social, industrial and political developments in the later decades of the nineteenth century, sculpture and epigraph combine to reveal ethical, ideological and moral dimensions that might otherwise remain hidden in what Stephen Cheeke has described as ‘the sensuous field of the visual’ and the logocentric pretensions of the verbal.