Literary Criticism Of Matthew Arnold

The basis of Arnold's high reputation as literary critic

Many of the ideas that appear in Arnold's Preface of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Analysis of the Preface reveals a poet who found a theoretical basis for poetry (by which he means literature in general) in the dramas of the Greek tragedians, particularly Sophocles: action is stressed as an indispensable ingredient, wholes are preferred to parts, the didactic function of literature is promoted -- in short, the Preface reads like the recipe for a classical tragedy. It is a young poet's attempt to establish criteria for what poetry ought to be. He found the Romantic idiom outworn. Literature was, in Arnold's perception, meant to communicate a message rather than impress by its structure or by formal sophistication. Modern theories of coalescence between content and form were outside the contemporary paradigm. T S Eliot's ambivalent attitude to Arnold -- now reluctantly admiring, now decidedly patronizing -- is puzzling. Eliot never seemed able to liberate himself from the influence of Arnold. What in Arnold's critical oeuvre attracted and at the same time repelled Eliot? That question has led to an in-depth analysis of Arnold as a literary critic. This book begins with an examination of Arnold's letters to Clough, where "it all started" and proceeds with a close reading of the 1853 Preface. A look at some of the later literary essays rounds off the picture of Arnold as a literary critic. This work is the result of Reader and Review comments of the author's well received Eliot's Objective Criticism: Tradition or Individual Talent? "Yet he is in some respects the most satisfactory man of letters of his age." -- T S Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

"Culture and Anarchy" is Arnold's most famous piece of writing on culture which established his High Victorian cultural agenda and remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. Arnold's often quoted phrase "culture is the best which has been thought and said" comes from the Preface to Culture and Anarchy. The book contains most of the terms–culture, sweetness and light, Barbarian, Philistine, Hebraism, and many others–which are more associated with Arnold's work influence.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social and religious critic.