CLOUGH, ARTHUR HUGH (1819-1861), English poet, was born at Liverpool on Jan. 1, 1819. In 1822 his father, a cotton merchant, moved to the United States, and Clough's child hood was spent mainly at Charleston (S.C.). In 1828 the family visited England, and Clough was left at school at Chester, whence he passed in 1829 to Rugby, then under Dr. Thomas Arnold. In 1837 he went with a scholarship to Balliol college, Oxford. Here his contemporaries included Benjamin Jowett, A. P. Stanley, J. C. Shairp, W. G. Ward, Frederick Temple and Matthew Arnold. Clough missed a Balliol fellowship, but obtained one at Oriel, with a tutorship, and lived the Oxford life of study, speculation, lectures and reading-parties until 1848, when he went abroad, seeing Paris in revolution and Rome in siege. In the autumn of 1849 he became principal of University Hall, a hostel for students at University college, London. He disliked London, in spite of the friendship of the Carlyles, nor did the atmosphere of Unitarian ism prove any more congenial than that of Anglican Oxford to his critical and at bottom conservative temper. In 1852 en couraged by Emerson, he went to Cambridge (Mass.). Here he remained some months, lecturing and translating Plutarch for the booksellers, until in 1853 the offer of an examinership in the Education Office brought him to London once more. He married, and pursued a steady official career, diversified only by an appoint ment in 1856 as secretary to a commission sent to study certain aspects of foreign military education. In 186o his health began to fail. He visited first Malvern and Freshwater, and then the East, France and Switzerland, in search of recovery, and finally came to Florence, where he died on Nov. 13, 1861. Matthew Arnold wrote upon him the exquisite lament of Thyrsis.
Shortly before he left Oxford, in the stress of the Irish potato f amine, Clough wrote an ethical pamphlet addressed to the under graduates, with the title, A Consideration of Objections against the Retrenchment Association at Oxford (1847). His Homeric pastoral The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, afterwards re-christ ened Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), was inspired by a long vacation reading-party after he had given up his tutorship, and is an enter taining experiment. Ambarvalia (1849), published jointly with his friend Thomas Burbidge, contains shorter poems of various dates from 184o, or earlier, onwards. Amours de Voyage, a novel in verse, was written at Rome in- 1849; Dipsychus, a rather amorphous satire, at Venice in 185o; and the idylls which make up Mari Magno or Tales on Board, in 1861. A few lyric and elegiac pieces, later in date than the Ambarvalia complete the tale of Clough's poetry. His only considerable enterprise in prose was a revision of the 17th century translation of Plutarch by Dryden and others, which occupied him from 1852, and was published as Plutarch's Lives (1859).
He is rightly regarded, like his friend Matthew Arnold, as one of the most typical English poets of the middle of the 19th century. His critical instincts and strong ethical temper brought him athwart the popular ideals of his day both in conduct and religion. His verse has upon it the melancholy and the perplexity of an age of transition. He is a sceptic who by nature should have been with the believers. He stands between two worlds, watching one crumble behind him, and only able to look forward by the sternest exercise of faith to the reconstruction that lies ahead in the other. On the technical side, Clough's work is inter esting to students of metre, owing to the experiments which he made, in the Bothie and elsewhere, with English hexameters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Clough's Poems were privately collected, with a Bibliography.-Clough's Poems were privately collected, with a short memoir by F. T. Palgrave, in 1862 ; and his Poems and Prose Remains with a memoir by his widow in 5869. Selections from the poems were made by Mrs. Clough for the Golden Treasury series in 1894, and by E. Rhys in 1896. See monographs by S. Waddington (1883) and J. L. Osborne (192o) . Clough's sister Anne Jemima Clough (182o-92) was the first principal of Newnham college, Cam bridge.