Arthur Hugh Clough
Arthur H. Clough | |
---|---|
Born | Liverpool | 1 January 1819
Died | 13 November 1861 Florence | (aged 42)
Language | English |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
Genre | Poetry |
Spouse | Blanche Mary Shore Smith |
Arthur Hugh Clough (/klʌf/ KLUF; 1 January 1819 – 13 November 1861) was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to Florence Nightingale. He was the brother of suffragist Anne Clough and father of Blanche Athena Clough, who both became principals of Newnham College, Cambridge.
Life
Arthur Clough was born in
Oxford, in 1837, was in the full swirl of the
- Clough accompanied [Emerson] to Liverpool to see him off on his return to the United States, saying sadly, "What shall we do without you? Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert and he has left us there" – a remark which was exactly true. Emerson said in reply that very many of the fine young men in England had said this to him as he went up and down in his journeyings there. "And I put my hand upon his head as we walked, and I said, 'Clough, I consecrate you Bishop of All England. It shall be your part to go up and down through the desert to find out these wanderers and to lead them into the promised land'."
In the summer of 1848, Clough wrote his long poem
Since 1846, Clough had been financially responsible for his mother and sister (following the death of his father and younger brother and the marriage of his elder brother). In the autumn of 1849, to provide for them, he became principal of
A prospect of a post in Sydney led him to engage himself to Blanche Mary Shore Smith, daughter of Samuel Smith, of Combe Hurst, Surrey[11] and Mary Shore (sister to William Nightingale) but when that failed to materialize, he travelled in 1852 to Cambridge, Massachusetts, encouraged by Ralph Waldo Emerson. There he remained for several months, lecturing and editing Plutarch for the booksellers, until in 1853 the offer of an examinership in the Education Office brought him to London once more.[5] He married Miss Shore Smith and pursued a steady official career, diversified only by an appointment in 1856 as secretary to a commission sent to study foreign military education. He devoted enormous energy to working as an unpaid secretarial assistant to his wife's cousin Florence Nightingale.[5] He wrote virtually no poetry for six years.
In 1860, his health began to fail. He visited first
He died in Florence on 13 November 1861.[6] He is buried in the English Cemetery there, in a tomb that his wife and sister had Susan Horner design from Jean-François Champollion's book on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Matthew Arnold wrote the elegy of Thyrsis to his memory.[6]
Clough and his wife had three children: Arthur, Florence, and Blanche Athena.[11] The youngest child, Blanche Athena Clough (1861–1960), devoted her life to Newnham College, Cambridge, where her aunt (his sister Anne) was principal.[12]
Writings
Shortly before he left Oxford, during the Great Famine of Ireland of 1845–1849, 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-fuosich, afterwards renamed Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), and written in hexameter 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 circa 1840 onwards.
Amours de Voyage, a novel in verse, was written at
Clough's output is small and much of it appeared posthumously. Anthony Kenny notes that the editions prepared by Clough's widow, Blanche, have "been criticized ... for omitting, in the interests of propriety, significant passages in Dipsychus and other poems." But editing Clough's literary remains has proven a challenging task even for later editors. Kenny goes on to state that "it was no mean feat to have placed almost all of Clough's poetry in the public domain within a decade, and to have secured for it general critical and popular acclaim."[13]
His long poems have a certain narrative and psychological penetration, and some of his lyrics have a strength of melody to match their depth of thought. He has been regarded as one of the most forward-looking English poets of the 19th century, in part due to a sexual frankness that shocked his contemporaries.
Clough wrote the short poem "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth", a rousing call invoking military metaphors to keep up the good fight; which fight is unspecified, but it was written in the wake of the defeat of Chartism in 1848. Other short poems include "Through a Glass Darkly", an exploration of Christian faith and doubt, and "The Latest Decalogue", a satirical take on the Ten Commandments.
"The Latest Decalogue's" couplet on murder, "Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive officiously to keep alive:" is often quoted – usually out of context – in debates on medical ethics in the sense that it is not right to struggle to keep terminally ill people alive, especially if they are suffering. Further, this couplet influenced Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (in particular, the First Law's "or through inaction" clause).[15] Broadcaster Geoffrey Robertson QC used the phrase in an episode of his television series, Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals ("Affairs of the Heart," ABC, 1989), illustrating this point of view; it is unclear whether Robertson was aware Clough's version of the Fifth Commandment had nothing to do with the alleviation of suffering but was instead referring to those who do not afford—in any circumstances—due respect to the sanctity of human life. Clough himself gives no indication that the couplet on murder might refer to the medical profession in general or to the treatment of the terminally ill in particular; indeed, the entire text of "The Latest Decalogue" satirizes the hypocrisy, materialism, the selective ethics and self-interest common to all of mankind.
This bitter judgement of humanity should be balanced against the more compassionate view he displays in other poems such as "Through A Glass Darkly": "Ah yet when all is thought and said, the heart still overrules the head; still what we hope we must believe, and what is given us receive".
In the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, several chapters have epigraphs from poems by Clough: "Duty" (1841), The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich (1848) and "Poems" (1841–1852).
Notes
- ^ Clough, A.H. (1874) Poems, London, Macmillan, p.vii.
- ^ A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, fifth edition, vol. I, Sir Bernard Burke, 1871, p. 251, 'Clough of Plas Clough'
- ^ Some Poets, Artists & 'A Reference for Mellors', Anthony Powell, 2005, Timewell Press, p. 85
- ^ A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, fifth edition, vol. I, Sir Bernard Burke, 1871, p. 251, 'Clough of Llwyn Offa'
- ^ a b c d e Stephen 1887.
- ^ a b c Chambers 1911.
- ^ Kenny, Anthony. "Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819–1861)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5711
- ^ Recounted in "James Russell Lowell and His Friends", by Edward Everett Hale, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1898, pages 136-137.
- ^ Anthony Kenny, 2005, pg. 181, 218.
- ^ J. R. Howard Roberts and Walter H. Godfrey (editors) (1949). "University Hall (Dr. Williams' Library), Gordon Square". Survey of London: volume 21: The parish of St Pancras part 3: Tottenham Court Road & neighbourhood. Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved 18 June 2012.
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has generic name (help) - ^ a b A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, fifth edition, vol. I, Sir Bernard Burke, 1871, p. 251
- ^ Newnham College biography
- ^ Anthony, Kenny, 2005, pg. 286.
- ^ a b Glenn Everett. "Arthur Hugh Clough – A Brief Biography". Victorian Web.
- ISBN 0-380-75432-0.
Attribution:
- public domain: Chambers, E. K. (1911). "Clough, Arthur Hugh". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 561. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
References
- Stephen, Leslie (1887). Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 127–128. . In
- Kenny, Anthony. "Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819–1861)". doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5711. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- Clough's Poems (1862) edited, with a short memoir, by F. T. Palgrave,
- Letters and Remains, with a longer memoir, privately printed in 1865. *Both volumes published together in 1869, and reprinted
- Robindra Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration(1972)
- Samuel Waddington, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Monograph (1883)
- Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough, a Poet's Life (2005)
- Howard F. Lowry and Ralph Leslie Rusk (editors), Emerson–Clough Letters, Hamden: Archon Books, 1968.
- Stefano Paolucci, Emerson Writes to Clough: A Lost Letter Found in Italy, in Emerson Society Papers, vol. 19, n. 1, Spring 2008.
- Selections from the poems were made by Mrs Clough for the E. Rhysin 1896.
- "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1969), by John Fowles.
- Rupert Christiansen, The Voice of Victorian Sex : Arthur H. Clough, 1819-1861, London: Short Books, 2001 (Short Lives)
External links
- Works by Arthur Hugh Clough at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Arthur Hugh Clough at Internet Archive
- Works by Arthur Hugh Clough at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- The Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough
- Arthur Hugh Clough Index Entry at Poets' Corner
- Arthur Hugh Clough's poetry at Minstrels
- Poem Hunter
- Collection of short poems by Arthur Hugh Clough
- "Archival material relating to Arthur Hugh Clough". UK National Archives.