Matthew Arnold

(1822-1888)
Poet, Educator and Literary Critic.

"It is not enough that the Poet should add to the knowledge of men,
it is required of him also that he should add to their happiness."

- Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham and received his education at Oxford. Arnold published The Strayed Reveler, the first of his volumes of poetry in 1849. He married Frances Lucy Whightman in 1851, and in the same year was named Inspector of Schools. He later became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1858, until his retirement in 1866. He produced two volumes of Essays in Criticism between 1865 and 1888.

His own stylistic genre of writing is best described in a letter he wrote to his mother in 1869, he writes: "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs."

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next." - Matthew Arnold

[excerpts taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, M.H. Abrams, General Ed.]