ABSTRACT
The spell which Clough threw over his contemporaries has become a memory, and yet his poems are by no means dead. It ought to be possible, therefore, to survey them candidly, and this acute and interesting book is a great help towards doing so. It disabuses one of the idea that Clough is out of date because he wrote about ‘problems.’ As a conscientious intellectual he could not help doing that, but his musings are not of the single type which they have often been supposed to be. Nothing ages so quickly for new generations as the religious perplexities of the old, and it is unlucky for Clough that a simplifying legend has labelled him the poet of doubt. With the emphatic notes of ‘Easter Day’ in our mind, or the more subtle avowals of poems like https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203194430/814e892f-c2ab-454b-9361-8d7f4505c24c/content/ch61_page399-01_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> it is rather hard not to yield to this impression. But it is scarcely true of the first or last current of his poetry; nor does it represent the ruling one, except for a time. What preoccupies him most is the relation of feeling to action, and the purity or falsity of both. As his difficulties came largely from his intellectual nature, he puts them in a speculative way. And as the conscience and the intellect in him were equally exigent he is bound to raise the final query about ‘the purpose of our being here.’ But, as Mr. Osborne reminds us, he deals more and more with these matters on their human and universal side. ‘The nature of friendship and love and marriage and parenthood, the service of God and fellow-service’— these are the problems to which he continually comes back. He is facing immediate questions, whether mental or practical, and this necessity determines his imaginative form.
