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.