Matthew Arnold
(1822–1888)

Of all the great Victorian poets, Matthew Arnold strikes twentieth century readers as the most modern. The persistent theme of his poems—people's isolation and alienation from nature and from one another—has been echoed by many writers and thinkers of our own age. His pessimistic outlook—that "there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done"—too coincides with the view of many today that we are a generation of lost souls.

Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, Middlesex, and educated in Rugby School, where his father, a believer in the good of social change, was headmaster. Arnold entered Oxford in 1841 and developed the serious and sensitive social conscience that was to guide his career as a public servant, poet, and literary critic.

In 1851, Arnold accepted the post of Inspector of Schools, which he held until two years before his death. In this job he traveled through England and the Continent, and published reports that did much to improve public education in Great Britain. All the while, he remained a poet at heart, though his first two books, published in 1849 and 1851, met with little success.

His fortune changed in 1853, with the publication of Poems: A New Edition, which included a long preface that established Arnold as writer of clear critical prose as well as of quality poetry. With New Poems (1867), which contained his celebrated "Dover Beach," Arnold felt that he had expressed everything he had to say through poetry. From that point forward, he thus focused his creative energies on literary criticism.

The melancholic outlook of his poems, Arnold himself noted, was unrelieved by hope. Nevertheless, it was his belief that the role of literature was to "inspirit and rejoice the reader: that is shall convey a charm and infuse delight." In such critical works as Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold argued also that literature should train us to open our minds to what is true and valuable in life. For Arnold, then, literature's truth and cultural value lay in its ability to enlarge and develop humanity's "moral and social passion for doing good." Even his critical examinations of the classics and of Dante and Shakespeare were in part attempts to help readers of his day find permanent values in an industrialized society that Arnold viewed as increasingly materialistic and self-serving.

Despite his own opinions regarding the shortcomings of his poetic vision, Arnold's "dark" poems are a mirror of critical beliefs: They charm and delight audiences, as well as point out enduring truths.

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