The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

This study explores the development of Matthew Arnold’s poetic vision through three specific stages. Close attention is particularly devoted to the poetic language and structure of representative texts in the attempt to stress the often neglected aspects of his prosodic and rhetorical skills. Although traditionally regarded as the third major poetic figure of his age after Tennyson and Browning, Arnold undeniably remains the most neglected poetic voice of the Victorian period. Yet, the existential angst and struggle that marks his poetical works, together with his essentially irresolvable world-view, are factors which speak directly to the modern reader. Chapter one traces Arnold’s ambivalent reception of Romanticism, particularly in the representation of childhood and nature. The two central texts analysed in detail are “To a Gypsy Child by the Sea-Shore” and “Resignation”, the latter of which may be seen as a antithetic to the romantic legacy of Wordsworth. Chapter two focuses exclusively on “Empedocles on Etna”, which Arnold subsequently rejected for its pessimistic and self-defeatist tone. However Arnold’s representation of the prolonged mental distress of his main protagonist offers a fascinating insight into the spiritual and cultural malaise that had become engrained in the Victorian intellectual as well as anticipating the elements of sweetness and light that were to become the watchwords of his social criticism. Chapter three traces Arnold’s poetic representation of the fragmented and buried self through a consideration of the “Switzerland” sequence which, besides its melancholic representation of romantic love contains some of his most profound pronouncements on human isolation and suffering. The final chapter focuses on four of Arnold’s greatest poems (“Dover Beach”, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, “Thyrsis” and “Rugby Chapel”) The moral zeal that characterises his social and cultural criticism finds its way into these poems which attempt to proffer solutions to the ontological and existential dilemmas of his vision through a re-evaluation of Christian values.