The English poet and critic Matthew arnold was born in Laleham on the Thames on December 24, 1822. His father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the prominent people Lytton Strachey was to critically portray in Eminent Victorians, became a celebrated teacher of the Rugby School, and his ideals of Christian education were very influential. Educated in Rugby and later at Balliol College, Oxford, he soon began writing poetry. The closest friend of his youth was Arthur Hugh Clough, a poet and disciple of Dr. Arnold, whose death Matthew he would cry later in his elegy “Thyrsis“.
In 1844 Arnold he received a second-class honors degree from Oxford, and the following year was chosen for a scholarship to Oriel College. After a stint as a teacher, he became a private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who at the time appointed him to conduct an inspection of the schools, a difficult and demanding job that required Arnold travel a lot but kept it for most of his life.
Several of the early poems of Arnold express his desperate love for a girl he calls Marguerite. Scholars have been unable to identify her, and it was never clear whether she actually existed. In 1851 Arnold married Frances Lucy Wightman, the daughter of a judge. The marriage was a happy one, and some of the most attractive poems of Arnold They are aimed at your children.
In 1849, under the pseudonym “TO“published a collection of short lyrical poems called The Strayed Reveler; the sale was poor and the book was withdrawn. In 1852 he published another collection, “Empedocles on Etna and other poems“, but this one too, after a sale of only 50 copies, was withdrawn.
In 1853 he published a collection called Simply Poems; which included poems from the two previous collections, as well as others never published before, in particular “Sohrab and Rustum” Y “The Scholar Gypsy“. Poems: Second Series (1855) includes another little epic epic in free verse, “Balder dead“inspired by Norse mythology.
In 1857 Arnold he was elected to the chair of poetry at Oxford, and held this position until the following decade. He was the first poetry teacher to give his lectures in English rather than in Latin.
In 1858 he published Merope, a classic tragedy, which refers to the revenge of a young man on a tyrant who has killed the young man’s father and married his mother. New Poems (1867) includes “Thyrsis: A Monody“, the pastoral elegy in which Arnold returns to celebrate the Oxford countryside and mourns the death of his friend Clough. In 1869 Arnold collected his poems in two volumes. An important new poem is “Rugby Chapthe “, in which he pays tribute to his father.
Its two volumes Essays in Criticism (1865 and 1888), include essays on a variety of writers: Marcus Aurelius, Heinrich Heine, Leon Tolstoy and William Wordsworth among them. His critical essays deal with discipline and the preservation of taste at a time when literary standards were threatened by commercialism and mass education.
Of the various books that Arnold wrote on politics and sociology the most important is “Culture and anarchy“(1869). He criticizes the English politicians of the 19th century for their lack of purpose and their excessive concern for the machinery of society.
Of the four books in which he dealt with the threat to religion posed by science and historical scholarship, the most important is “Literature and dogma“(1873). In it he argues that the Bible has the significance of a supremely great literary work, and as such cannot be discredited on charges of historical inaccuracy. And the Church, like any other time-honored social institution, must be renovated with care and with a sense of its historical significance to English culture.
Arnold he was one of the great Victorian controversialists, and his books were contributions to a national discussion of literature, religion, and education. His style is witty, ironic and varied; he exhorts his readers, rebukes them, even mocks them. His books were widely read, and in the magazines in which he published regularly, he defended his views against everyone. In 1883 and 1886 he traveled the United States and gave lectures, in which he tried to win Americans for the cause of culture.
On April 15, 1888, Arnold he went to Liverpool to meet his beloved daughter, and died there of a sudden heart attack.