“Say not the struggle nought availeth” and “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive/ Officiously to keep alive” are probably the only lines most people know by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861), although the standard Oxford edition of 1974 contains nearly two hundred items, excluding fragments and translations. That edition, and the excellent annotated selection edited by J. P. Phelan in 1995, are out of print, so it is to be hoped that this new biography by Anthony Kenny, formerly Master of Balliol, Clough’s old college, will prompt a resurgence of interest in the work of a poet who has increasingly come to seem the most modern-minded of any in the nineteenth century.

Kenny is terse to the point of brusqueness, rattling us with no nonsense through Clough’s forty-two years, which were lived out in an atmosphere of personal and international ferment. The son of a Liverpool merchant, he lived with his family in Charleston, South Carolina, between 1822 and 1828 (Kenny says 1838, the first of a series of unfortunate misprints). Back in England, he was a star pupil at Rugby during the headmastership of Dr. Arnold. Kenny takes a disappointingly conventional view of this despotic bully, who wrecked sensitive, high-minded boys like Clough by turning them into neurotic prigs, magnifying their boyish lapses into grave sins, and saddling them with guilt. Clough eventually recognized this, but Arnold’s influence died hard. Having obtained a second-class degree from Oxford, rather than the expected first, Clough dashed to Rugby