Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
The following remarks on the study of Celtic Literature formed the substance of four lectures given by me in the chair of poetry at Oxford. They were first published in the Cornhill Magazine, and are now reprinted from thence. Again and again, in the course of them, I have marked the very humble scope intended; which is, not to treat any special branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which I am quite incompetent), but to point out the many directions in which the results of those studies offer matter of general interest, and to insist on the benefit we may all derive from knowing the Celt and things Celtic more thoroughly. ... Read more

Book Description
In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold'sletters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of Mixed Essays, IrishEssays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essays gathered later in Essaysin Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth and The Poetry of Byronappeared, as did the controversial essay "The Study of Poetry," with its notorious and veryreadable touchstone theory.

The emotional and moral center of the volume, however, is the extraordinary series ofletters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New Yorkand New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, andQuebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, includingthe president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and,especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit--a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son'sdebts--had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied byhis wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry--the direct cause ofa second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendantsin the United States. ... Read more

Amazon.com
E.M. Forster once wrote that, "Matthew Arnold is of all the Victorians most to my taste: a great poet, a civilised citizen, and a prophet who has managed to project himself into our present troubles, so that when we read him now he seems to be in the room."Forster's words still ring true today, as any recent reader of Culture and Anarchy could attest.A spirited proponent of free and deep thinking and an inveterate opponent of the trite, the commonplace, and the closed-mindedness that he saw in his Victorian England, Arnold was a culture molder, a spinner of thoughts and critical essays, who held a mirror up to an England that would have rather looked away.He was also an activist for free and compulsory education, a poet, and professor, and he shows us how low our contemporary pundits rank among the pantheon of social commentators.

Drawing from the Letters of Matthew Arnold as well as a lode of new research, Nicholas Murray's A Life of Matthew Arnold attempts to bring Arnold into fuller view.A poet himself, Murray has a familiar grasp on Arnold's artistic sensibility.One can't help but think, however, that the title points out an inability to capture Arnold's multidimensionality.The lifelong public servant is not so easily squared with the character Murray has sketched.Nevertheless, this is a superb account of Arnold and one that does much to bring an overlooked but supremely relevant literary figure back into our midst. ... Read more

Book Description
The Oxford Poetry Library series offers compact and fully annotated editions of some of the most important and best-loved English poets. Drawing on the acclaimed texts of the Oxford Authors series, these collections provide a generous selection of the verse of figures as diverse as Andrew
Marvel and Alexander Pope, Matthew Arnold and Ben Jonson. Ideal for anyone interested in the eloquently wrought observations and thought of some of the English language's greatest writers, The Oxford Poetry Library should find a welcome place on the bookshelves of all lovers of literature.
Matthew Arnold, a leading Victorian man-of-letters, was interested in many of the social issues of his time and was renowned as the foremost social critic of his day. The poignant, elegiac tone of his work is the authentic hallmark of his poetic gift. This selection includes some of his best-known
classics--"Dover Beach," "The Scholar Gipsy," "Mycerinus," and the Marguerite poems--as well as many less familiar works. ... Read more

Book Description
Nearly everyone agrees that Arnold is a central figure in Victorian literature, yet his place in literary history is difficult to define.Tracing Arnold's literary development through his life helps us to understand the peculiar nature of his accomplishments.Clinton Machann examines the evolution of Arnold's writings and casts new light on the forces that shaped the career of this extraordinary man of letters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very Select Company.
Matthew Arnold became a brilliant 'elegiac' poet of poets who helped to form the 'modern consciousness' with his comparative attitude to problems in Western society and culture. Allen Tate, a member of the Vanderbilt 'Fugitives' group of poets, preferred Matthew Arnold to Browning or Tennyson. Now, in English Lit. I liked Browning; my favorite poem was ABOU BEN ADHEM by Leigh Hunt.

In Birmingham, England, in the farmland and English Midlands, young Arnold was born in 1822. He was the eldest son of "the greatest Headmaster who ever lived" (an imposint father) who had his own Rugby School. Rugby, Tennessee, here in the beautiful mountains of East Tennessee was built on the principle of this stern headmaster, a communal farming project, which failed in the United States. It is steeped in history and still has the crudely built houses with their own small library. They were English intellectuals, not farmers. They were the first organic farmers in this area, near Oneida -- so high it's the closet place to Heaven I've ever been.

Mrs. Arthur Claugh, wife of one of his friends, in London kept every item in Matthew's room "just as he had left it" and "waiting" as a memorial to a great and beloved poet. His carrer was a study in "sensitivity, courage and endurance." Strange for a rebel of the family (I was the rebel in my family -- the baby) to excel at literary endeavors, as he opposed his unpoetic father. Matthew had been lucky in his marriage and lucky with is teachers and friends, an Archbishop of Canterbury, Wordsworth and Browning. His son, Dick shared a passion for family, which had been one secret of Matthew Arnold's success.

He became a poetry professor and wrote "Essays in Criticism" and "Culture and Anarchy". I was married to a Lit. professor, the only one at Martin College at the time, who insisted I take English vs. American Lit. His "The Forsaken Merman" inspired Sylvia Plath. He can be compared with Jonathan Edwards with his political treatises.

The number one book to read on Arnold
This is a compact, intelligent account of Arnold's work and life. It is not just a narrative; it argues for the pervasive power of Arnold's spiritual search throughout his work, from the poetry, to the cultural criticism, to the neglected religious criticism. If you want to know more about Arnold, this is the book to read: less dense than the Trilling biography, more intellectual than the Hamilton and Honan biographies, and better than any student introduction. ... Read more