Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough

Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough were friends for decades. They knew each other at Rugby School and then at Oxford, where their relationship flourished and deepened. Clough was a great influence on the development of Arnold’s poetry for a decade, beginning in the early 1840s. Arnold acknowledged this in a letter to Clough in 1853, in which he wrote, “The period of my development […] coincides with that of my friendship with you” (quoted in Matthew Arnold: A Life by Park Honan, McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 66). Often in the afternoons, the two men would walk together in the area Arnold later recalled so fondly in “Thyrsis.” Unfortunately, in 1853 there was a serious rupture in their relationship. Clough wrote a number of letters to Arnold in which he criticized him for failures in their relationship. According to Honan, Clough accused Arnold of “pride, ambition, smugness, egotism, and coldness over five years” (p. 278). Moreover, in July 1853, Clough published a hostile review of Arnold’s poetry in The North American Review. Although Arnold seemed to take it quite well, amending some of his poems in line with Clough’s comments, and even thanking him, the friendship was badly damaged. Also, Arnold seemed to depend on Clough’s support to produce his poetry, so he wrote fewer and fewer poems after this date.