Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and cultural critic in the nineteenth-century Victorian period of English literature. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famous Headmaster of Rugby School, London. Mathew Arnold was an inspector of schools for thirty-five years. He was an educationist and supported state-supported secondary education.
His famous poems were Dover Beach, The Scholar Gypsy, Thyrsis, and prose works like Culture and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma, and The Study of Poetry. His other works included Empedocles on Etna and Sohrab and Rustum. Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. On Translating Homer was a significant achievement of Arnold. Culture and Anarchy was his major study of culture, religion, and education. Along with his father, Thomas Arnold, they mesmerized English education in schools.
Mathew Arnold was a Victorian poet, so he expressed his doubts in his poems. He wrote:
“Wandering between two worlds
One is almost dead.
Another powerless to be born.”
About his poetry, he himself wrote:
“It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning yet because I have perhaps 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.”
It is an exceptionally frank but not unjust self-assessment. Arnold’s poetry continues to attract scholarly attention. His poems give evidence of the intellectual history of nineteenth-century England. Many critics said there is a dearth of passion in Arnold’s poetry, but it is not correct. He had a passion of another kind – culture and education. Mathew Arnold was a crusader of culture and education. His Culture and Anarchy testifies to it. His passion for culture and education is well-known. He said, “Culture is sweetness and light. Men of culture are children of light. Culture can replace religion. Culture is a quest for perfection, and he is the happiest man who is progressing in perfection.” Arnold was a culturologist.
As he was an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, his mind was always bent on education. This influenced his poetry and prose. He was always in a teacher’s mode. Later on, in the twentieth century, the poet W.B. Yeats was also an inspector of schools, and his poetry was also influenced by education. One of his such poems was Among School Children.
The modern poet T.S. Eliot expressed the degeneration of culture, sex, and religion in his The Waste Land. Arnold and Eliot both moved from anxiety to serenity and from regret to desire.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own.)
Radhakanta Seth is a Former Income tax officer in Sambalpur. He is a Freelance writer and his articles have been published in some Oriya dailies like Sambad, Samaj, Dharitri and English dailies like The Telegraph and in a sociological journal ‘Folklore’ published from Kolkata.
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