Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), was one of the intellectual leaders of Victorian England. He ranks with Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins among the greatest Victorian poets. Arnold was also the most important English literary critic of his time. He was a major social critic, and wrote important works on religion and education.
Arnold’s poetry expresses his experience during an age when traditional religious beliefs and certainties were being questioned without new beliefs to take their place. As he wrote in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855), he felt himself to be
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born …
Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach,” describes the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith.” His poetry resembles the poetry of our own time in its yearning for peace and its portrayal of personal loneliness. Faced with these difficulties, Arnold often counseled resignation and endurance.
Arnold’s prose includes the literary criticism in Essays in Criticism (1865, second series 1888) and the social criticism of Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold judged both literature and Victorian society according to the standard of “the best that is known and thought in the world.” He found recent writers of his time, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, or Robert Burns, inadequate when measured against Homer, Dante, or William Shakespeare. Arnold condemned what he felt was the tendency toward anarchy (lawlessness) in Victorian culture. Arnold found his society resisting the new ideas that come from a “free play of the mind,” which he highly valued. He hoped that maintaining high standards of judgment would aid the return of better literature and a better society.
Arnold was born on Dec. 24, 1822, in Laleham. His father was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, the famous English secondary school. Arnold attended Rugby and Oxford University. In 1851, he became an inspector of schools for the British government, a post at which he worked hard for the next 35 years. Most of his poems were published between 1849 and 1855. His prose appeared after 1855. Arnold served as professor of poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was the first person in that post to lecture in English instead of Latin. He died on April 15, 1888.
