matthew arnold writing style article

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A letter to Clough describes these poems as having “weight” but “little or no charm,” and wonders whether “I shall ever have heat and radiance enough to pierce the clouds that are massed around me.” Yet escape or isolation was impossible—“Woe was upon me if I analyzed not my situation” and “the modern situation in its true blankness and barrenness and unpoetrylessness.” In the other letter, to his mother on March 3, 1865, Arnold writes, “No one has a stronger and more abiding sense than I have of the daemonic element—as Goethe called it—which underlies and encompass our life; but I think, as Goethe thought, that the right thing is, while conscious of this element, and of all that there is inexplicable around one, to keep pushing on one’s posts into the darkness, and to establish no post that is not perfectly in light and firm.” The dominant effect conveyed by these letters is of an independent mind, the primacy of reason, and the compulsion to understand the world as well as oneself. Poetry. Gladstone once gave expression to his deep disappointment, or to something like displeasure, saying I ought to have been a bishop. For Arnold future hopes revolve around a change in perspective, where the individual develops an intrinsic response to culture’s untramelling truths. The mood of Arnold's poetry tends to be of plaintive reflection, and he is restrained in expressing emotion. As a type he refers to them as ‘Barbarians’. Crowd sourced content that is contributed to World Heritage Encyclopedia is peer reviewed and edited by our editorial staff to ensure quality scholarly research articles. From his critical vantage-point he surveys the barren ground of contemporary thought, with its blinkered deference to progress, action and duty, and sees a land incapable of propogating true culture. The Marguerite of the Switzerland lyrics was indeed real, as was the anguish of the lover who could not surrender himself to passion. In his poetry he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from traditional or literary sources, and much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems from Senancour's "Obermann".           Dwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within, He considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were "high truth" and "high seriousness". that not In 1853, he published Poems: A New Edition, a selection from the two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on Etna, but adding new poems, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy. “In Utrumque Paratus” shows that as early as 1846 Arnold could contemplate with equanimity alternative answers to man’s cosmic questions. Two months later, he married Frances Lucy, daughter of Sir William Wightman, Justice of the Queen's Bench. /* 728x90, created 7/15/08 */ [37; emphasis added]. Two letters are especially relevant to the kind of writing in this division of Arnold’s poems, poems so often intellectual in impact and bare in style. [22], Selections from the Prose Work of Matthew Arnold[23], Arnold's work as a literary critic began with the 1853 "Preface to the Poems". Matthew Arnold —> Works —> Genre and Style]. Hellenism is humanity’s primary expression of ‘spontaneity of consciousness’, evincing the reflective traits that aspire to the truest representations in literature, poetry and religion. Matthew Arnold Homework Help Questions. It contained what is perhaps Arnold's most purely poetical poem, "The Forsaken Merman." Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his poetry criticism.          Political / Social. (I find the Ruskinian, bull-in-the-china-shop approach more honest and appealing, but people I respect look to Arnold. google_ad_slot = "4852765988"; I caused him much sorrow by my views upon theological subjects, which caused me sorrow also, but notwithstanding he was deeply grieved, dear friend as he was, he travelled to Oxford and voted for me for Professor of English Poetry.' Under the influence of Baruch Spinoza and his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, he rejected the supernatural elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. google_ad_client = "ca-pub-2707004110972434"; The struggle itself, however, is most clearly seen in “Absence,” where the necessary choice between feeling and reason, and the pain of making it, elicit a cry of anguish: This is the curse of life! "[30] He defined religion as "morality touched with emotion". The aristocracy, exhibitors of an ornamental ‘exterior’ culture, can no longer be looked to as exemplars of aestheticism and inspirational values. This was to be his routine occupation until within two years of his death. He won prizes for Latin verse and for English essay and verse—his prize poem Alaric at Rome (1840) was printed at Rugby—and earned a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1840. google_ad_width = 160; (1849); this was followed (in 1852) by another under the same initial: Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely. His poem Cromwell won the 1843 Newdigate prize. The first category most obviously anticipates Arnold’s later development as critic, consisting as it does of poems in which differing views on man, nature, or art are balanced or contrasted, advanced or rejected. Eliot, as academic versifying. "[18], George Watson follows George Saintsbury in dividing Arnold's career as a prose writer into three phases: 1) early literary criticism that begins with his preface to the 1853 edition of his poems and ends with the first series of Essays in Criticism (1865); 2) a prolonged middle period (overlapping the first and third phases) characterised by social, political and religious writing (roughly 1860–1875); 3) a return to literary criticism with the selecting and editing of collections of Wordsworth's and Byron's poetry and the second series of Essays in Criticism. For a detailed summary of the location of Arnold's literary manuscripts and letters, see Barbara Rosenbaum and Pamela White, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume 4: 1800-1900, Part 1: Arnold to Gissing (London: Mansell/New York: Wilson, 1982). More recent writers, such as Collini, have shown a greater interest in his social writing,[20] while over the years a significant second tier of criticism has focused on Arnold's religious writing. On the other hand, few readers will fail to respond to Arnold’s well-known lines in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse“ describing himself as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born.” Romantic nostalgia for idealized older worlds, or for simpler states of being, is at the emotional core of many of his poems, with the insistent pressure of the present creating a conflict only to be resolved by a shift to prose and to the role of midwife, or at least prophet, of a better world in the future. The prospect of glacially slow growth never discouraged Arnold. That vision is soberly expressed in the late essay “A French Critic on Milton”: “Human progress consists in a continual increase in the number of those, who, ceasing to live by the animal life alone and to feel the pleasures of sense only, come to participate in the intellectual life also, and to find enjoyment in the things of the mind.” Author of. Whereas organised religion presents a model of ‘incomplete perfection’, an intrinsic response to Christian teaching reveals a language of ‘Sweetness and Light’, attuned to the personal quest for integration and perfect harmony. First, there is that large body of reflective or gnomic verse, where the poet’s voice is freely heard but which shows varying degrees of detachment, in tones of questioning or stoicism or contemplation. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, The Riverside Press Cambridge (1920), p 301; Watson, 1962, pp. The keynote was struck in his inaugural lecture: “On the Modern Element in Literature,” “modern” being taken to mean not merely “contemporary” (for Greece was “modern”), but the spirit that, contemplating the vast and complex spectacle of life, craves for moral and intellectual “deliverance.” Several of the lectures were afterward published as critical essays, but the most substantial fruits of his professorship were the three lectures On Translating Homer (1861)—in which he recommended Homer’s plainness and nobility as medicine for the modern world, with its “sick hurry and divided aims” and condemned Francis Newman’s recent translation as ignoble and eccentric—and the lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in which, without much knowledge of his subject or of anthropology, he used the Celtic strain as a symbol of that which rejects the despotism of the commonplace and the utilitarian. The major manuscript repositories for Arnold are the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Arthur Kyle Davis Papers at the University of Virginia. He said they had caused sorrow to his best friends."Mr. Stead. Muller declared that “if in an age of violence the attitudes he engenders cannot alone save civilization, it is worth saving chiefly because of such attitudes.” It is even more striking, and would have pleased Arnold greatly, to find an intelligent and critical journalist telling newspaper readers in 1980 that if selecting three books for castaways, he would make his first choice The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (1950), because “Arnold’s longer poems may be an acquired taste, but once the nut has been cracked their power is extraordinary.” Arnold put his own poems in perspective in a letter to his mother on June 5, 1869: “It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.” But that also meant that he, among the first generation of the railway age, travelled across more of England than any man of letters had ever done. Arnold is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. [36] Arnold saw the "experience" and "reflection" of Liberalism as naturally leading to the ethical end of "renouncement," as evoking the "best self" to suppress one's "ordinary self. Matthew Arnold one of foremost critic of 19th century is often regarded as father of modern English criticism . [9], In 1865, Arnold published Essays in Criticism: First Series. [9], In 1886, he retired from school inspection and made another trip to America. For example, the characteristic method of Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is to meet all theological objectons by denying that metaphysical questions have any meaning. If “The Buried Life” illuminates one side of Arnold’s dual search, hinting at a fleeting possibility of happiness through self-discovery in love, “Dover Beach” offers a somber picture of a world that has defeated all attempts at comprehension. Abbreviation: CPW stands for Robert H. Super (editor), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, see Bibliography. He wrote verse for a family magazine, and won school prizes, His prize poem, "Alaric at Rome", was printed at Rugby. The Arnolds had six children: Thomas (1852–1868); Trevenen William (1853–1872); Richard Penrose (1855–1908), an inspector of factories;[note 1] Lucy Charlotte (1858–1934) who married Frederick W. Whitridge of New York, whom she had met during Arnold's American lecture tour; Eleanore Mary Caroline (1861–1936) married (1) Hon. "Initially, Arnold was responsible for inspecting Nonconformist schools across a broad swath of central England.