Arthur Hugh Clough

1819—1861
Illustrated black and white headshot of poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Rischgitz / Stringer - Getty

English Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough suffered from the intense pressures of high expectations. He attended at the prestigious Rugby School and then studied at Oxford, but he resigned his fellowship and eventually found a career as an examiner in the British Education Office. Clough is best known for his early, shorter poems and for the longer, later work that sprang from his intense religious doubts. He was an important influence on later poets such as T.S. Eliot, and his best work hints at the radical experiments and split subjectivities that would become the hallmarks of Modernism.