Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)
English poet. In 1829 he entered Rugby, perhaps the most important independent school in nineteenth-century England. Thomas Arnold had recently become headmaster there and soon started to introduce important reforms which affected the English "public" school system.
Clough distinguished himself at school, and in 1837 he became an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 1841 and in 1842 he won a Fellowship at Oriel College. Clough intended to become a clergyman, but between 1848 and 1849 he went through a religious crisis and decided to resign his Fellowship.
In the same year, he went first to France, then to Italy, to participate in Mazzini's Republic. His poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Vuolich, A Long-Vacation Pastoral, was published in 1849. During the same year, he returned to London to become principal of the (Unitarian) University Hall and Professor of English at University College. In 1852, though, Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him to give some lectures in Massachusetts and Clough resigned from University Hall.
On his return from America, Clough married Blanche Smith and took a job in the Education Office, in London. In 1858, Amours de Voyage was published; like most of Clough's poetry, it deals with romantic love, doubt, and social conflict.
He spent the last years of his life helping his wife's cousin, Florence Nightingale, to reform hospitals and the nursing profession. He died in Florence, Italy, after contracting malaria. In 1869, his widow published posthumously The Poems and Prose Remains of A.H.Clough.