Antithetical Developments in the Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold

Abstract

<p>My thesis involves a study of a development in Arnold's poetry that is antithetical to the development of Arnold's prose. At first, Arnold's poetry preached an active, moral involvement in the world. This stance gradually collapsed, and, from quite early in his career, Arnold's poetry is characterized by detachment and withdrawal from life.</p> <p>Arnold's literary criticism exhibits an opposite movement. The Preface to Poems (1853) stresses the necessity for the pleasurable presentation of an action as a basis for poetry, and explicitly denies that the poet in any way interprets his age. This, says Arnold, is the "delirium of vanity." Yet Arnold makes an about face. He decides later, in his essay on Maurice de Guerin (1862), that poetry must be both the "interpretress" of the "natural" and "moral" world. This stance characterizes his later literary criticism.</p> <p>The first chapter of my thesis deals with the above development in Arnold's poetry up to the 1853 volume of poems. The chapter ends there because the change described above has, by that time, taken place. The second chapter deals with Arnold's middle and later poetry, but primarily with the antithetical development of his early literary criticism. The third and fourth chapters deal with Arnold's middle and later literary criticism, as well as Culture and Anarchy and Literature and Dogma, and the relationship between this prose and the contemporaneous poetry.</p>