Matthew Arnold, (born December 24, 1822, Laleham, Middlesex, England—died April 15, 1888, Liverpool), English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class), and the “Populace.” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy (1869).
Life
Matthew was the eldest son of the renowned Thomas Arnold , who was appointed headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. Matthew entered Rugby (1837) and then attended Oxford as a scholar of Balliol College; there he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem Cromwell (1843) and was graduated with second-class honours in 1844. For Oxford Arnold retained an impassioned affection. His Oxford was the Oxford of john hennry newman just about to be received into the Roman Catholic Church; and although Arnold’s own religious thought, like his father’s, was strongly liberal, Oxford and Newman always remained for him joint symbols of spiritual beauty and culture.
In 1847 Arnold became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who occupied a high cabinet post during Lord John Russell's Liberal ministries. And in 1851, in order to secure the income needed for his marriage (June 1851) with Frances Lucy Wightman, he accepted from Lansdowne an appointment as inspector of school. This was to be his routine occupation until within two years of his death. He engaged in incessant traveling throughout the British provinces and also several times was sent by the government to inquire into the state of education in France, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland. Two of his reports on schools abroad were reprinted as books, and his annual reports on schools at home attracted wide attention, written, as they were, in Arnold’s own urbane and civilized prose.
idea of Matthew Arnold which I found interesting and relevant in this times.
Arnold asserts that literature, and especially poetry, is "Criticism of Life". In poetry, this criticism of life must conform to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as are exhibited in the best poets, are what constitutes a criticism of life.
Poetry, says Arnold, interprets life in two ways: "Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and moral profundity". And to achieve this the poet must aim at high and excellent seriousness in all that he writes. This demand has two essential qualities. The first is the choice of excellent actions. The poet must choose those which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human feelings which subsist permanently in the race. The second essential is what Arnold calls the Grand Style - the perfection of form, choice of words, drawing its force directly from the matter which it conveys
These two ideas of him are relevant in our time from my opinion. Poetry is a way to describe life and events so it can be taken in a critical way to look in the depth of lives. Poetry should also be in reached with its poetic beauty and should reflect the true situations in ones life. this all points which are mentioned above by M. Arnold are still in our life and our culture so, we can relate this with today's time.
One idea of Matthew Arnold which I found out-of-date and irrelevant in this times.
Attaching paramount importance to poetry in his essay "The Study of Poetry", he regards the poet as seer. Without poetry, science is incomplete, and much of religion and philosophy would in future be replaced by poetry. Such, in his estimate, are the high destinies of poetry.
Arnold pointed out that without poetry science is incomplete. we can take that for granted but the lines afterwards are "Much of religion and philosophy would in future be replaced by poetry". - this idea is out -of-date today cause religion is everything and everywhere for many peoples thus there is or will be no chances of poetry over taking religion and philosophy.
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