Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was an English poet, essayist and critic. He was a professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1857 to 1867, inspector of schools for 35 years from 1851, was commissioned twice over to visit France, Germany, and Holland, to inquire into educational matters there. He wrote two separate reports thereon of great value. He was also author of "Poems," of a highly finished order and showing a rich poetic gift, "Essays on Criticism," "Culture and Anarchy," "St. Paul and Protestantism," "Literature and Dogma," &c. Arnold was a man of culture, and especially literary culture, of which he is reckoned the apostle. He is known for such poems as "The Scholar-Gipsy" and "Dover Beach".

He died suddenly at Liverpool. He was more eminent as a poet than a critic, influential as he was in that regard. "It is," says Swinburne, "by his verse and not his prose he must be judged," and is being now judged.

Wisdom & Quotes

• And here we are as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
- Dover Beach

• Resolve to thyself: and know that he

Who finds himself, loses his misery.
- Self-dependence

• He bears the seed of ruin in himself.

- Merope

• With women, the heart argues, not the mind.

- Merope

Roman Baldorioty de Castro