Clough

 Like Pessoa, Arthur Hugh Clough is a poet whose fame, such as it is, rests on a body of work published after his death. Clough is like Pessoa, too, in being quite unclassifiable: a protégé of Thomas Arnold at Rugby and a close friend of Matthew Arnold at Oxford, he should have slipped naturally into his place in the Victorian literary firmament, but it never quite happened. After he died, at the age of only 42, Walter Bagehot, reflecting the general view, wrote of him as a man 'who seemed about to do something, but who died before he did it', while James Russell Lowell described him as 'dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art'. Oh dear, the 'sterner requirements' – one can only hope Clough was oblivious of them; his work is certainly at its best when least stern. There is little or nothing of the Victorian's cherished 'high seriousness' about his novel in verse 'Amours de Voyage' (which has been more than once performed very effectively on radio). The line 'Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it' is one that has lived on, along with 'Say not the struggle naught availeth' (a fine example of the weakness of the English negative) and 'Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive/Officiously to keep alive' (from 'The New Decalogue', written as satire, not as a justification for medical negligence). 
  I'm looking at Clough again, at present reading 'Dipsychus', a long dialogue, set in Venice, between the conscience-troubled Dipsychus (double-spirited) and an unnamed, somewhat Mephistophelian 'Spirit'. It's remarkably frank, especially on sexual matters, and tremendously readable, especially the contributions of the Spirit, who of course gets all the best lines, including the lyric beginning 
'As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
   How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
   How pleasant it is to have money.'
In the decades following the posthumous publication of his works, Clough was widely read and popular, but, like many another, his reputation suffered at the hands of Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians) and he fell out of fashion and out of print. Happily his reputation revived with new editions of his works, though it seems unlikely he will never again be widely read. This is a shame: there is, as I am reminding myself, so much to enjoy in his work. 'Consider whether you attain the beautiful,' Arnold (Matthew) once wrote to him, 'and whether your product gives PLEASURE.' It certainly does.