ABSTRACT
In the seven years preceding his marriage in 1854 at age 35, Arthur Hugh Clough wrote three long poems of contemporary life, each of which is generically and formally different from the others. The Bothie of Toperna-Fuosich: A Long-Vacation Pastoral is written in hexameters. The 'bizarrerie of the style [and] playful, mock-heroic key', Charles Kingsley noted in his review, gave Clough 'scope for all sorts of variations into the bucolic, sentimental, broad-farce, pathetic, Hebrew-prophetic, whatnot' (Thorpe, 40). In Amours de Voyage, Clough again employed hexameters, but there is nothing mock-heroic about what he called 'my 5 act epistolary tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy' (1957, ii, 546). The work is a verse novella, an Anglo-Saxons-in-Italy comedy of manners that anticipates those of Henry James and E. M. Forster. The unfinished Dipsychus, which also has an Italian setting (Venice this time rather than Rome), consists of a series of dialogues between the title character and a 'Spirit', interspersed with lyrics and soliloquies. While the work has obvious affinities with Goethe's lyric drama Faust, it as often calls to mind Byron's Don Juan and Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas.
