Mari Magno, Dipsychus and Other Poems

Overview

The true haunts of the poetic powers, Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire compulsion of what has once been done. . . . There walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre. "Mari Magno," written in the last years of Clough's life, is a modern Canterbury Tales, with travelers on a transatlantic crossing exchanging stories about love and marriage. The unfinished dramatic poem "Dipsychus," a Faustian dialogue, was started in Venice when Clough was still a young man and revisited and revised throughout his life. He described it as "the conflict between the tender conscience and the world." These two unfinished masterworks and a selection of Clough's shorter poems will feed the growing interest in this most lovable and no-longer-neglected Victorian.

Reviews

"There is a restlessness—and a 'modern,' not a Victorian restlessness, if the distinction may be made—about Clough."  —Poetry magazine

Author Biography

Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet and intellectual. He was an English professor and tutor and an examiner in the Education Office. Anthony Kenny is an English philosopher and a former president of the British Academy and Royal Institute of Philosophy.