Discussion and assessment of Matthew Arnold as a poet.
The poetry and prose of Mathew Arnold represent in time, tone and subject matter two separate and distinct creative efforts. The poetry of Arnold occupied only his earlier years up to 1867. His poetry is characterized by doubt and melancholy. It has been said that Browning never lost faith, Tennyson struggled from doubt to faith, and Arnold always doubted. He didn’t rebel against Victorianism, however his intellectual and sensitive nature couldn’t reconcile itself to the Victorian environment. As a writer Arnold felt the collapse of ancient religion from the assaults of science, “higher criticism” of the Bible and school of thought, pervasive his poetry may be a profound sense of loneliness and unhappiness. The bonds between man and God and between man and Nature have been shattered, and man lives in an indifferent world of mechanical laws.
The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849) is dominated by the distinction between the lifetime of strained action and also the lifetime of detached serenity. Quiet Work, The rejected Mermon, Resignation square measure a number of the outstanding poems enclosed within the series. philosopher on Etna and different Poems (1852) shows Arnold’s increasing tendency towards faith and philosophy. In Isolation the author abandons all hope of fulfillment through shared expertise. To Marguerite’ laments that there’s now not any channel for communication on the extent of the deeper sensibilities. self-deceit may be a mood of desperate bemusement because the man asks why man is presented with potentialities and so is foiled in any decide to create constructive use of them. fictitious character and character is Arnold’s 1st try at an extended verse narrative. Poems, a new Edition (1853) for the primary time bore the writer’s name upon the page. Sohrub and Rustum, the foremost well-liked Arnold literary work derives its tale of ancient Persian heroes from Sir John Malcolm’s History of Persia. The Scholar Romany makes an ardent denouncement of latest intellectual confusion and frustration and offers an perfect vision of immature integrity of spirit, victorious over division and alter. within the Poems, Third Edition (1857) is enclosed the second To Marguerite (we were apart) whereby the author laments the horrifying loneliness of the age. Merope: A Tragedy (1858) Arnold’s longest try at verse was a chilly failure. Thyrsis within the same textual matter because the Scholar gipsy echoes a lot of of the sooner literary work, during a pastoral poem to Clough. within the New Poems (1867) square measure enclosed Dover Beach, rugby football Chapel and Obermann yet again. Dover Beach expresses poet’s disappointment at the loss of religion within the trendy age. during this literary work, melodic lyric and sharp visual symbols square measure moulded into a fascinating, anguished depiction of what he deems to be the fashionable quandary.
Arnold’s poetry is entirely reflective and intellectual. A great humanist and nurtured in the ancient literatures and a lover of Greek art, Arnold had a classic moderation and exactness of thought. The classic spirit reveals itself in the lucid style, the absence of violent effects and those decorative graces for which Arnold blamed Tennyson. But his romantic spirit manifests itself in his disillusion and discontent with the present.
Arnold received the least popular recognition in his own age, but in the twenth century he enjoyed the best reception. The troubled and unresolved spirit of the twenth century finds greater kinship with him than with the more complacent Browning and Tennyson.