Mari Magno, Dipsychus and Other Poems

‘The true haunts of the poetic powers,’ Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, ‘are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire compulsion of what has once been done - There walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre.’ Mari Magno, written in the last years of Clough’s life, is a modern Canterbury Tales, the travellers on a trans-Atlantic crossing exchanging stories about love and marriage. The unfinished dramatic poem Dipsychus, a Faustian dialogue, was started in Venice when Clough was still a young man, and revisited and revised throughout his life. He described it as ‘the conflict between the tender conscience and the world’. These two unfinished master-works and a selection of Clough’s shorter poems will feed the growing interest in this most lovable and no longer neglected Victorian.