Sir – Debbie Dance gives a good account of Matthew Arnold’s feelings about the landscapes around Oxford (Oxfordshire Limited Edition, September 2011), but she relays his view of Clough, who, by the way, was not a fellow undergraduate, but already a graduate when Arnold came up, and soon a fellow and then tutor at Oriel College. Clough took under his wing the two Arnold brothers, Matt and Tom, together with a Scottish student, Todo Walrond.

He introduced them to the walks around Oxford and also to the ‘dangerous’ writings of Carlyle, George Sand and David Strauss.

Arnold and Clough disliked each other’s poetry. Arnold was a melancholy romantic, who liked to escape from the present into dreams of wandering scholars and Greek myths. Clough was a realist who thought that poetry should deal with the modern world with its dark side as well as its brilliant achievements.

He treated subjects such as illusions of love in a second-class railway carriage and the beauty of young women uprooting potatoes. He eventually resigned as tutor and fellow, exasperated by the stuffy introversion of Oxford.

In the 1860s, the posthumous publication of Clough’s large body of poetry was bringing him a growing reputation, and he was beginning to be seen as at least the equal of Arnold. By casting him as Thyrsis, the loser of a poetic contest between Virgilian shepherd boys, and himself as Corydon, the winner, Arnold, who has been called ‘the cultural dictator of the Nineteenth Century’, created a false image of Clough, which persists to this day.

November 13 will be the 150th anniversary of Clough’s death. I hope The Oxford Times will help to commemorate it and to re-establish the reputation of a man who deserves to be seen as one of Oxford’s greatest poets.

Philip Stewart, Boars Hill