The Poetry of Arnold by Matthew Arnold
"The Poetry of Arnold" refers to the works of Matthew Arnold, a Victorian poet often overshadowed by contemporaries Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Despite producing only 129 poems, Arnold's intellectual depth and themes resonate with modern sensibilities. He grappled with significant existential questions, particularly concerning faith and the loss of religious certainty in his time. Arnold’s poetry is characterized by a tone of melancholy and resignation, reflecting his struggle with the spiritual dilemmas of the Victorian era, as seen in poems like "Dover Beach" and "Thyrsis."
Arnold sought to elevate poetry as a means to interpret life and address its complexities, demanding a "high seriousness" and depth of thought from poetic expression. Unlike his peers, he was more reflective and less emotionally involved, leading to a perception of his work as somewhat detached. Despite his limited production and critical reception, Arnold's observations about modern life and disillusionment remain relevant, echoing contemporary concerns about purpose and fulfillment. His works continue to invite exploration for those interested in the interplay of Victorian themes with modern existential questions.
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The Poetry of Arnold by Matthew Arnold
First published:The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, 1849; Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, 1852; Poems, 1853; Poems: Second Series, 1854; Merope: A Tragedy, 1857; New Poems, 1867; Poems, Collected Edition, 1869
Critical Evaluation:
Matthew Arnold has often been called “the forgotten Victorian,” and it is certainly true that his poetry is much less read than that of his two great contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning. Their vast productivity tends, as it did a century ago, to overshadow his rather modest accomplishment. For even if we include his two prize poems written at Rugby and at Oxford, we find that his total adult production amounts to only 129 poems, none of exceptional length by Victorian standards. “Empedocles on Etna,” one of his longest, is less than a thousand lines. Also, after the publication in 1867 of his NEW POEMS, when he was only forty-five, Arnold wrote very little poetry. He turned more and more to prose, and his increasing fame as a critic of literature and of society soon drove his poetic achievement into the background, so that to modern readers he is familiar, if at all, only through a few standard anthology pieces, such as “Dover Beach” and “The Scholar-Gypsy.” Yet it has become almost a critical platitude to say that Arnold’s poetry, in its intellectual content, is much closer to the modern mind than is that of either Tennyson or Browning.
Arnold was quite aware of the limited audience to which his poetry appealed. In 1858 he wrote to his sister, complaining that the lack of public appreciation of his work deprived him of the stimulus needed for creative effort. To write poetry with the high quality of both content and craftsmanship that he demanded of himself was, he said, an “actual tearing of oneself to pieces”; moreover, his position as an inspector of schools did not allow him the time he needed for the writing of verse. He knew also that he lacked many of the qualities possessed by Tennyson and Browning that made them so widely popular; he did not have Browning’s intellectual vigor or Tennyson’s musical skill. He was not capable of the strenuous affirmations of the later Browning or of the final struggle to faith that Tennyson achieved in In Memoriam. He had only the “gray elegiac mood,” and this was not calculated to make a writer popular in nineteenth century England or America. There were Browning Societies everywhere in the English-speaking world, and Tennyson became a national institution. Arnold was ignored except by an intellectual elite.
The demands that Arnold made of poetry were high. In THE STUDY OF POETRY (1850) he wrote: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will remain incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” Poetry must have “high seriousness”; it must be “a criticism of life”; it must exhibit “the application of ideas to life.” All of this is asking a great deal of poetry, perhaps asking more than it is capable of accomplishing. To expect that poetry will take the place of religion—even of “what now passes for religion”—is to place upon the poet an intolerable burden. Yet the question of religion is one that goes straight to the center of Arnold’s poetry and of his intellectual and religious predicament.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Arnold had been reared in the liberal Protestantism of the early part of the nineteenth century and had, upon reaching his middle years, found this faith to be completely unsatisfactory. At Oxford he had been exposed to Newman’s Tractarian Movement but had been little affected by it, perhaps because of the Low Church tradition of his youth. The crucial point in his whole religious situations may be found in the famous lines from “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”:
Wandering between two worlds, one
In the Carthusian monastery, Arnold caught a glimpse of a faith that strangely attracted him but which his Protestant upbringing made him instinctively regard as anachronistic, as a fossilized relic of a dead past. Yet he could find no new faith to take the place of that which he had lost, for modern men have not yet found the answer:
Achilles ponders in his tent,
It was his awareness of the spiritual dilemma created by the ebbing of traditional religious faith that brings Arnold so close to the modern mind. Tennyson wrestled with the problem of faith and doubt in In Memoriam and finally attained to a trust in “the truths that never can be proved”; but Arnold could hear only the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” as the sea of faith, which had once encircled the whole world, slowly retreated like the ebbing tide at night. He saw nothing to fill the vacuum thus created and took refuge in a kind of Stoic detachment and resignation that find expression in the last stanza of Empedocles’ song:
I say: Fear not! Life still
We must, therefore, accept life as it is, must strive “to be in the world but not of it,” neither hoping nor fearing overmuch.
This attitude of detachment and resignation gives to Arnold’s poetry a curiously negative quality that is at once apparent to the reader. His view of life permitted no deep emotional involvement: for example, the poems to Marguerite are certainly the most tepid love poems ever written by a great poet, and it is significant that even today the identity of the woman to whom they were addressed remains a mystery. In “Thyrsis,” his elegy on his friend Clough and a poem of great beauty in its description of the English countryside, Clough always remains a shadowy, retreating ghost; never does the poet feel, as did Tennyson, that “the living soul was flash’d on mine.” Instead, Clough has faded into classical mythology, leaving for Arnold “that lonely tree against the western sky.” Yet for verbal beauty “Thyrsis” is rivaled in the English language only by “Lycidas.”
In many respects Arnold resembles T. S. Eliot, and perhaps this resemblance explains why Eliot did not care greatly for Arnold’s poetry. But whether his withdrawn attitude was the result of an inward weakness or of Arnold’s dislike of his own age, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty. That he despaired of the world he saw around him is sufficiently obvious; few of his lines are more often quoted than these from “The Scholar-Gypsy”:
. . . this strange disease of modern
It was from the ugliness and the materialism of the world of the Philistines that he withdrew, to seek what solace he could find in the calm, dispassionate world of the classics.
Yet it is equally clear that Arnold felt the lack of something positive in his own nature, for like most men of his time he had a great sense of responsibility. Obviously, he longed for the decisive force of his father, the famous Headmaster of Rugby and a representative of an older, more confident generation. In “Rugby Chapel,” his elegy for Thomas Arnold, dead these fifteen or more years, the poet sought to express what he considered the essence of his father’s greatness: “that he was not only a good man saving his soul by righteousness, but that he carried so many others along with him in his hand, and saved them . . .” Or, as he contrasted the two generations in his poem:
Yes! I believe that there lived
In recent years there have been attempts to psychoanalyze the conclusion to “Sohrab and Rustum” in an effort to find in the poet’s mind some record of a subconscious conflict between son and father. Such an interpretation seems unnecessary. One of the chief marks of the Victorian age was its haunting sense of “something lost”; in its own endless questionings it looked back with regret to an earlier time when traditional values seemed, at least in retrospect, to have been unquestioned. To Arnold, his father was one of those giants of old days which the mid-nineteenth century could no longer produce.
Arnold’s poetry has not fared too well at the hands of modern critics. T. S. Eliot, as influential in our time as was Arnold in his, considered him an academic poet whose verse had little technical interest. He has not had the influence on modern poetry that Browning, at least with his dramatic monologues, has exercised, nor has he experienced the revival of popularity accorded to Tennyson. He still remains “the forgotten Victorian.” But he has much to say that is applicable to the contemporary situation, for all of the ills that he so clearly saw in nineteenth century England have been aggravated in the passage of a hundred years. His famous description of the “darkling plain” is even more appropriate today, and the lines from “The Scholar-Gypsy” might well be written of modern men:
Of whom each strives, nor knows