SD1357. Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 362 (in part).

London

Monday, [?early December 1848]

My dearest Clough

What a brute you were to tell me to read Keats’ Letters. However it is over now: and reflexion resumes her power over agitation.

What harm he has done in English Poetry. As Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement & fulness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness, so Keats with a very high gift, is yet also consumed by this desire: & cannot produce the truly living & moving, as his conscience keeps telling him. They will not be patient—neither understand that they must begin with an Idea of the world in order not to be prevailed over by the world’s multitudinousness: or if they cannot get that, at least with isolated ideas: & all other things shall (perhaps) be added unto them. …

Publication: The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1996–2001), 1, 128–129.

Manuscript: Yale University.

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