Swinburne is right, Clough is a bad poet - so bad that he has not had a whole book written about him for over thirty years; could never make a living out of his poems; and rarely bothered, it was said, to talk about poetry. Moreover (and this makes him a very bad poet) he seems to have valued ideas more than words. ‘The “Iliad”’, he writes, ‘is but the scum of the mind of Homer, and Plato's dialogues the refuse of his thought’; words, for Clough, are merely the rubbish left over after the main event that is thinking.

Swinburne is also right to say Clough is dull - he writes about dull things like rain, lunch and railway guides; and he did dull jobs, like working as a private tutor, as an Examiner in the Education Office, and as Florence Nightingale's secretary. He was also interested in the dull subject of poetic metre, so much so that when, at a gathering which included Alfred Tennyson, the topic of conversation moved to prosody, Tennyson turned to Clough and asked: ‘Well, good man Dull, what have you to say?’

Well, ‘good man Dull’ has a lot to say. For a start he has much to say about being dull, being bad and, above all, about being a failure. When, to everyone's astonishment, he failed to get a First at Oxford, he famously walked all the way to Rugby to announce: ‘I have failed.’ Clough echoes this sentiment as, later in life, he fails to get a series of academic posts, fails to set up a school in America, and fails to live beyond the age of 42. (Clough died following an ill-defined nervous breakdown caused, to some extent, by the sheer exhaustion of endlessly folding letters and making up parcels for Florence Nightingale).