Matthew Arnold

Matthew ArnoldArnold was an English poet and critic of the Victorian age. He attended Rugby School in London, a school run by his father, Thomas Arnold. When he was of age he went on to Balliol College, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1845. Thereafter he was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, Lord President of the Council, through whose influence he was appointed as school inspector in 1851. Arnold would remain a school inspector all his life, traveling widely over Britain and even the European continent, and writing extensively on the state of British education.Arnold's influence on literary criticism is immense; some have argued he is the most important literary critic of the nineteenth century. He is often considered to be the founding father of academic criticism in English, and the principles for literary criticism.He was also a major cultural critic, and his views on the moral degeneration of his times are often seen today as strikingly prescient. He became a vigorous defender of "high culture" and classic literary education when such institutions were rapidly crumbling in the face of changing times; and, although his views on culture remain controversial, it is undeniable that his work in cultural criticism was directly responsible for reinvigorating literary and artistic scholarship in the nineteenth century.His poetry ,In 1849, he began to publish his book of poetry. In his poetry, he reflects on the doubt of his age, and the conflict between science and religion.His 1867 poem Dover Beach,which depicted a nightmarish world from which the stability of religious faith has been lost, is sometimes held up as one of the earliest, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility. Like many other authors stretching well into the twentieth century, Arnold was concerned with what he saw as the collapse of civilization in the face of a rapidly industrializing modern world. In a famous preface to a selection of the poems of William Wordsworth, Arnold identified himself, a little ironically, as a "Wordsworthian." The influence of Wordsworth, both in ideas and in diction, is unmistakable in Arnold's best poetrySome consider Arnold to be a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his pessimistic opinions of the future were typical of the Modern era. His tendency towards pure rationalism offended some of his readers. He has come under criticism for this rationalist tendency in his poetry. His talents as a poet in general have also been criticized, with some authors criticizing his poetry for being overly sentimental and lacking in power. and his writings are characterized by the finest culture, high purpose, and sincerity.In 1883, Arnold was able to retire and devote himself to literature, receiving a pension of £250. Never fully free from financial troubles (including his son's gambling debts), he left the same year for a lecture tour of America. There his daughter would fall in love and marry an American. Five years later, when racing to meet his daughter and new granddaughter, he would suffer a fatal heart attack. He is buried in All Saints' Churchyard.Thomas Hardy, was the last important novelist of Victorian age. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature.While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.Hardy's work was admired by many writers of a younger generation including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Hardy’s characters often encount er crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition. But the hand of fate is an important part of many of Hardy's plots.PoetryIn 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. After giving up the novel form, Hardy continued to publish poetry collections until his death in 1928. Although he did publish one last novel in 1897, that novel, The Well-Beloved, had actually been written prior to Jude the Obscure.Although his poems were not initially as well received by his contemporaries as his novels were, Hardy is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His verse had a profound influence on later writers, notably Philip Larkin, who included many of Hardy's poems in the edition of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse that Larkin edited in 1973.Most of Hardy's poems, such as "Neutral Tones'" and "A Broken Appointment", deal with themes of disappointment in love and life (which were also prominent themes in his novels), and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Using stylistic patterns similar to those that he used in his novels, Hardy sometimes wrote ironic poems, like "Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave," in which he employed twist endings in the last few lines or in the last stanza to convey that irony. Some, like "The Darkling Thrush" and "An August Midnight", appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts to shorter poems such as "A Broken Appointment." A particularly strong theme in the Wessex Poems is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the nineteenth century, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig".Although Hardy’s faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question the traditional Christian view of God:Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism, deism, and spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied,Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits.[15] Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years, and Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy's novels.。