"Rome disappoints me much : " Clough, Rome, and Amours de Voyage

Abstract

Arthur Clough's Amours de Voyage can be briefly if inadequately described as an epistolary novella in verse, set in Rome in 1849, and tracing the cultural, political, and erotic adventures of Claude, a young Englishman not long graduated from Oxford, and the author of most of the letters. Or rather, since he refuses to commit himself, it traces his near-adventures: Emerson observed, grumpily, that it exhibited "much preparation to no result", which was "bad enough in life, and inadmissible in poetry." The author of a celebrated essay on "Self-Reliance" was unlikely to be won over by a hero whose vacillating nature is insinuated in his name (claudus: lame), but other friends had similar misgivings. John Shairp, reading the poem in manuscript, protested that "everything crumbles to dust beneath a ceaseless self-introspection and cynicism which is throughout the only inspiration." Matthew Arnold "forbore to comment", or even to apologise for not doing so: "what is to be said when a thing does not suit you [?]'' Recent critics have made the case for Amours de Voyage as a witty, poignant, and original work, but even now it is less often discussed, and more importantly less widely enjoyed, than it deserves.