Background
In 1822 the family moved to the United States, and Clough's early childhood was spent mainly in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1822 the family moved to the United States, and Clough's early childhood was spent mainly in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1828 Clough and his older brother Charles returned to England to attend school in Chester.
Cut off to a large degree from his family, he passed a somewhat solitary boyhood, devoted to the school and to early literary efforts in the Rugby Magazine.
He surprised everyone by graduating from Oxford with only Second Class Honours, but won a fellowship with a tutorship at Oriel College. He became unwilling to teach the doctrines of the Church of England, as his tutorship required of him, and he resigned as tutor and traveled to Paris, where he witnessed the revolution of 1848.
In 1853 the offer of an examinership in the Education Office brought him to London once more.
His long poems have a certain narrative and psychological penetration, and some of his lyrics have a strength of melody to match their depth of thought. He has been as one of the most forward-looking English poets of the 19th century, in part due to a sexual frankness that shocked his contemporaries.
Radical in religion.
Radical in his politics.He went to France in support of the revolution of 1848 and then to Italy the following year to participate in Mazzini's republic, getting trapped in Rome when it fell to the French
Father was a cotton merchant of Welsh descent.
Was from from Pontefract in Yorkshire.
Devoted her life to Newnham College, Cambridge, where her aunt (Arthur's sister Anne) was principal.
Clough and Arnold enjoyed an intense friendship in Oxford, but neither liked the other's poetry.
Matthew Arnold wrote the elegy of Thyrsis to his memory.
