Why Clough? Why Now?

This article focuses on poet Arthur Hugh Clough. At one recent meeting of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western U.S. conference on The Victorian World, there were a surprising four papers on Clough, enough to create an entire Clough panel. This was one of the younger panels at the conference — a number of the presenters were graduate students or recent PhDs. Scholars are studying Clough's experimentation with style, his attempt to adapt Greek and Latin forms to the English hexameter, and his innovative use of genre. The current work on Clough suggests that a reinvigorated formalist criticism is emerging within Victorian poetry studies.