EDUCATIONWELL

MATTHEW ARNOLD (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888)

• English Poet and Cultural Critic
• Arnold is the most important critic of the Victorian Age
• Characterised as Sage Writer ( Who instruct he reader on contemporary social issues and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education)
• He was influenced by writers like William Wordsworth, John  Keats, John Henry Newman, Goethe etc.
• He Influenced writers like George Saintsbury, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling etc.
• He discusses in detail about the various aspects of culture
• in his essay Sweetness and Light included in the collection Culture and Anarchy.
• Culture is the study of perfection
• T S Eliot considers Arnold’s essay Study of Poetry a classic in English criticism.
• According to Arnold poetry to be ranked as great poetry should possess truth and high seriousness.
• He does not consider Chaucer and Burns as great poets because they lack truth and high seriousness.
• The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, an important critical work was originally published in the National Review in 1864.
• In the Essays in Criticism he looks at the social function of  the critic.
• Watson says that Arnold was an adapter rather than a coiner of terms.
• He criticizes Romantic poetry  The romantic poet Byron was empty of matter. Shelley was incoherent. Wordsworth wanting in completeness and variety.
• Shelley as  "a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"
• Coleridge as  "a poet and philosopher wrecked in the mist of opium".
• Keats' letter as  "love letter’s of a surgeon’s apprentice".
• He said about, Carlyle a moral desperado, Ruskin eccentric, Swinburne a pseudo Shelley And Tennyson’s Maud a lamentable production.
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Major works

• 1849, first  published  book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller
• 1850, Memorial Verses to Wordsworth
• 1852, Second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems.
• 1853, Poems: A New Edition ( include major poems Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy)
• On Translating Homer  (1861) series of public lectures, to discuss how his principles of literary criticism applied to two Homeric epics  and to the translation of a classical text.
• 1866,  Thyrsis, his elegy to  Arthur Hugh Clough who had died in 1861.
• 1867 "Dover Beach" -  a lyric poem  in the collection New Poems. the title  is shore of the port of  Dover, in kent.
• 1867, Rugby Chapel - Elegy to his father Thomas Aronld
• 1869, Culture and Anarchy, About  social criticism
• 1873, Literature and Dogma, about  religious criticism