"Trust her for Teaching!": The Role of Venice in Arthur Hugh Clough's Dipsychus.

Clough’s dialogue-poem Dipsychus is an intriguing contribution to what might be defined “tourist literature”. While the theme of the “Innocent Abroad” can be said to be a well-established convention in Anglo-Italian literature, Clough is perhaps the first to make a penetrating examination of the specific relationship between the tourist and his guide. Venice provides a suitably ambiguous setting for this conflict between high aspirations and worldly cynicism and also allows the poet himself to come to terms with two overpowering literary “guides”: Byron and Ruskin.