Clough, ARTHUR HUGH, poet, was born at Liverpool, January 1, 1819. His father, a cotton-merchant there, belonged to an old Denbighshire family. In the winter of 1822-23 he emigrated to Charleston, in South Carolina, and there the boy mostly lived in the midst of a home-life of singular happiness, until in November 1828 he was sent back to school at Chester, and to Rugby in the summer following. Dr Arnold had already been head-master for a year, and his high ideal of Christian duty early made a profound impression upon the boy. At Rugby he was foremost in athletic sports, edited for some time the school magazine, and not only worked his way to every honour open to him, but gained the warm affection of all his school-fellows. In November 1837 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, but astonished all who knew his powers by only obtaining a second-class in 1841. In the spring of the following year he was elected to a fellowship at Oriol. Clough's residence at Oxford had fallen at a time of fierce theological controversy, and his sensitive spiritual nature reflected all the unrest of the atmosphere around him. For a time he fell under the spell of Newman's influence, but this was soon followed by a period of severe inward struggle between his absolute honesty of mind and the religious prepossessions of his youth, the result of which was that he felt it his duty to withdraw in 1848 from Ariel. A little earlier he had published his first long poem, the Bohice of Tober-na-Vuolich, a 'Long Vacation pastoral' in hexameter verse. He next spent some time in travelling in France and Italy, part of the time with Emerson, and was appointed on his return (October 1849) Warden of University Hall, London. His life here was far from congenial to him, but he found much help in the warm friendship of Carlyle. At Rome, in 1849, he had written his Amours de Voyage, and at Venice, during a holiday in 1850, he wrote Dipsychus. In 1852 he resigned his office, and sailed to America; but an examiner-ship in the Education Office soon recalled him to England. In June 1854 he married, and the remaining seven years of his life were spent in the calm peace of domestic happiness, free at once from the unrest of religious perplexity and the vexation of his earlier monetary liabilities undertaken for the sake of his father's business. In the spring of 1856 he was nominated secretary to the Commission for examining scientific military schools on the Continent, and the duties of this office carried him to France and to Vienna. But his health now began to give way, and he was advised by his physicians to travel. After visits to Greece, Constantinople, the Pyrenees, and Italy, he was carried off at Florence by paralysis succeeding a malarial fever, November 13, 1861.
Clough's poetry reflects with absolute sincerity all the spiritual unrest and conflict of his life, his passionate love of truth, and intense longing for reality. His few short lyrics are almost perfect in form and matter, but, as an artist in words, his best gift was perhaps his undeniable humour, which is of a rare and indeed exceptional quality. But his true significance is that pointed out with sure insight by Mr Lowell: 'We have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art, will 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 period in which he lived.'
Clough is the subject of Matthew Arnold's elegy Thyrsis, one of the finest tributes of passionate admiration to the dead in the English language, almost worthy indeed to be compared with the Lycidas of Milton, the Adonais of Shelley, and the In Memoriam of Tennyson. No truer words have been spoken of Clough than these:
The music of his rustie flute
Kept not for long its happy country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,
Which tasked his pipe too sore, and tired his throat.
See Samuel Waddington's Monograph (1882). A collected edition of Clough's Poems was published in 1862, with a memoir by F. T. Palgrave, and his Poems and Prose Remains, edited by his wife, with an admirable short memoir, in 2 vols. in 1869.