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The processes of composition and revision put impulse and inspiration into contact with calm reflection in a way that is continuous with the other kinds of human activity Clough describes in his poems—including Dipsychus and The Bothie—where instinct and hesitation have their competing advantages and exert their rival claims. This chapter explores the drafts of Clough’s poems, many of which were heavily revised and remained incomplete at the time of his death. It shows that revision is not solely a technical requirement for Clough; understood more broadly as an ongoing process of self-checking and self-correction, it is a moral requirement in leading a responsible, virtuous life.

Chapter 4, “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel,” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. The chapter considers overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile and Glenaveril, and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule.

Chapter 4 takes four major poems of the 1850s and analyses them through the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 3. It examines Tennyson’s In Memoriam as the poem made to stand for the voice of the Victorian age and analyses how the employment of pronouns creates that identity. A reading of Maud argues that Tennyson then critiques print culture and challenges the dominant public mode of poetry insisted on by reviewers. Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows and Clough’s Amours de Voyages offer examples of poets using address to experiment with a public poetics. Staging their poems outside England, both seek to expand what it means to write poetry for the British public.

This chapter applies the idea of a non-hierarchical, creative exchange of meaning to Hamo Thornycroft’s 1884 sculpture of The Mower, and its accompanying epigraph from Matthew Arnold’s 1866 elegy for the poet Arthur Hugh Clough: ‘Thyrsis’. The chapter argues that sculpture and epigraph, taken together, constitute a third inter-medial artwork in which the compromised relationship between the aesthetic act and the desire to apprehend the ‘real’ is manifested through a complex series of textual and, more importantly, genre citations – including classicism, naturalism, realism, pastoral elegy and Romantic lyric. These coalesce and interrogate each other in this most ‘realistic’ and ‘democratic’ of Thornycroft’s sculptures to date, establishing a competitive and a co-relational dialogue that is enacted on and by the body of the artwork. Placed in the context of social, industrial and political developments in the later decades of the nineteenth century, sculpture and epigraph combine to reveal ethical, ideological and moral dimensions that might otherwise remain hidden in what Stephen Cheeke has described as ‘the sensuous field of the visual’ and the logocentric pretensions of the verbal.

Although many historical narratives of the Risorgimento and early Italian constitutional monarchy view Italy as a nation-state unable to consolidate itself against political division and regional diversity, Italian political culture’s cultivation of a sense of internal fragmentation and powerlessness also constituted part of the Risorgimento’s ideological content and Italy’s national identity. Risorgimento culture’s oppositionalism also infiltrated British reaction to Italian politics. Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s eyewitness Athenaeum correspondence, collected as Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861), develops politicised familial metaphors for unification and international alliance that empower and transform Italy through political solidarity. By contrast, texts by D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Jenkin and Arthur Hugh Clough propose more sceptical familial and romantic metaphors for Risorgimento Italy, revealing disillusioned and hesitant attitudes toward Italy in relation to its neighbouring powers, including France, Austria and Great Britain.