“A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean…” — Arthur Hugh Clough | V2Melody

“A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read.”

Linking careless expression with a failure of consideration for the reader · Letter, February 1852

Art
Truth

Arthur Hugh Clough

About Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough

1 January 1819–13 November 1861

Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in…

More by Arthur Hugh Clough

Poems by Arthur Hugh Clough

More remarks by Arthur Hugh Clough

“For poetry, like science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of poetic knowledge which can no more be rewritten than could the elements of geometry.”

Describing great poetic language as exact, definitive and impossible to improve upon · Lecture on the poetry of Wordsworth

“Ignorance is a poor kind of innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking things.”

Arguing that genuine understanding requires experience beyond sheltered learning · Letter to a friend, 19 June 1850

Truth
Wisdom

“Go straight on, however, and one’s sure to come out into a new country, on the other side the hills, sunny and bright.”

Using a railway journey as an image of perseverance through difficult periods · Letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 23 February 1853

Hope
Time