lystn

Today’s poem is the one you had to read in high school without really understanding it. (Or was that just me?)

Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his poetry criticism. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more balanced formulation in his prose. This unity was obscured for most earlier readers by the usual evaluations of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as melancholy or elegiac, and of his prose as urbane, didactic, and often satirically witty in its self-imposed task of enlightening the social consciousness of England.Assessing his achievement as a whole, G.K. Chesterton said that under his surface raillery Arnold was, “even in the age of Carlyle and Ruskin, perhaps the most serious man alive” [though, from Chesterton, this is not entirely a compliment.] H.J. 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.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation