Book Description
Publication of this edition of all the known letters of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) has been recognized as an intellectual event of major importance. When complete in six volumes, it will present close to four thousand letters, many of which appear in their entirety here for the first time. In his introduction to volume 1, Cecil Y. Lang writes that the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."

In volume 4 of these letters, Matthew Arnold regroups. In his writings, he ranges from religion to literature; St. Paul and Protestantism in 1870 is followed by Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, and Last Essays on Church and Religion, all with their redemptive and customary wit and wisdom. These books have all more or less been forgotten now, but in the 1870s they were an integral part of intellectual culture, as was Friendship's Garland. Mixed Essays, revealing what Arnold calls a "unity of tendency," is an important and suggestive pivot combining literature and society, and it leads easily to his highly influential, enduring, and endearing Poems of Wordsworth.

Equally, the letters here continue to chronicle Arnold's personal life in the characteristically intimate note of all his correspondence. Arnold loses a son, a brother, and his mother (as well as his mother-in-law), and he moves seamlessly from the marvelous letters to his mother to the marvelous letters to his sister remaining at Fox How almost as if he had been writing all along not merely to an individual person but also to a spiritual anchor, or even to his moral center.

Arnold travels in France, Switzerland, and Italy, recording as always his incomparable impressions. He settles, finally, in Surrey, and poignantly says farewell to his youth in "George Sand," a moving and beautiful essay, just as he seems in his last home, Pains Hill Cottage, to be saying good-bye to Fox How. ... Read more

Book Description

Amazon.com
Matthew Arnold, who wrote some of the most beautiful poetry of the Victorian period, with lyrics that are peculiarly appropriate to the alienated longeurs of modern existence, should, it seems, enjoy a higher reputation today. Yet he distrusted his own poetic genius and effectively stifled it after its early blossoming. He devoted his maturity instead to writing worthy but unexciting prose criticism. His motives, and the extraordinary tension between passion and repression in the poetry he did write, are both excellently explored in Ian Hamilton's critical biography. The title of the study comes from W.H. Auden's assessment of Arnold's career: "He thrust his gift in prison till it died." Hamilton outlines that prison--the Victorian upbringing, the unhappy love affair that was beyond the pale of 19th-century convention and was thus abandoned, and the painful retreat from poetry--the one thing Arnold did best, deftly and wittily. Read Arnold's "To Marguerite--Continued" (surely the bleakest and most beautiful statement of hopeless love in the language); then read this book for its expertly sketched account of the life behind the poetry. --Adam Roberts Book Description
From acclaimed biographer Ian Hamilton, an examination of Victorian repression, the depth of Arnold's poetic gift, and the reasons for its strangulation

A Gift Imprisoned is a tale of the two lives of Matthew Arnold: the young and impassioned lyric poet, and, in his maturity, his poetic ambitions long-since quelled, Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic. Hamilton explores the reasons why Arnold, after a brilliant beginning, abandoned his poetic career; why he, as W.H. Auden wrote, "thrust his gift in prison till it died." These questions lead Ian Hamilton through beautifully reasoned considerations on the nature of creativity and its silencing. The result is a masterwork of the biographer's art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

First-Rate Biography
I first read Matthew Arnold in college, having never heard of him before.I was attracted to the inherent contradictions of his prose notions and his poetic reality.At the same time he was a yearning, deeply personal poet, he would criticize the tendency of contemporary poets to be personal and not grander in their notions.What this book does is give you some background into this contradiction, stemming from growing up with a very stiff, passionate for order father who instilled a sense of duty in Matthew that he was never able to overcome.The examples are plenty in the book and they do a good job of showing Matthew struggle with himself, his poetry, the age and the past to eventually discontinue his poetic works and focus solely on criticism and social reform.A fascinating portrait of one of the giants of Victorian Literature.

A third try for the right book
The real book is overlooked, not a single review.Matthew over came his childhood and stern upbringing to break out of the mold of his father's tutulege and become a political thinker.

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. In Birmingham, England, in the farmland and English Midlands, young Arnold was born in 1822. He was the eldest son of "the greatest Headmast who ever lived" 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.

Matthew 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. His carrer was a study in "sensitivity, courage and endurance." Strange for a rebel of the family 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 in 1857, wrote "Essays in Criticism" in 1862 and "Culture and Anarchy" in 1866. His "The Forsaken Merman" inspired Sylvia Plath.

Mrs. Arthur Claugh, wife of one of his good 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 of the ages across the pond.

Lines of Influence
This is a book for the generalist about Matthew Arnold's career in poetry.Things started out promisingly until he undertook to pursue his real vocation as an educational examiner too energetically to permit the gestation of poetic ideas and forms.Family and property concerns seemingly overtook him too.

His father, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, was a scholar of history, an expert on Thucydides.He was a contemporary of John Keble, the founder of the Oxford Movement.Thomas Arnold's vigorous activist brand of Christianity rather ran counter to the Oxford Movement.Matt had the disadvantage of never escaping the schoolmaster.The family had a vacation house in the Lake District.Friendships with Wordsworth and other poets were important to family members.

Matthew Arnold troubled his parents by seeming to never be serious.Sent to Winchester he was unpopular and set fire to his own gun.He returned to Rugby for the fifth and sixth forms.The boys considered him to be cool, detached.He gained entry to Baliol and, notwithstanding a second-class degree, won a Fellowship to Oriel.

At this stage Matthew Arnold became a close friend of Arthur Clough.Thomas Arnold died around 1842.Five weeks prior to his death he had been visited by Carlyle.Carlyle's quality of wild fire excited young readers.In 1845 Matthew Arnold was poised between dandyism and melancholia.He was thinking seriously he might be a poet.The novels of George Sand appealed to him.Matthew acquired a patron, Lord Lansdowne.Lord Landsdowne had more than one factotum.He was Chancellor of the Exchequer.The Marquis was the last of a generation of remarkable statesment.

Matt journeyed to Thun, Switzerland to meet a mysterious woman, Marguerite, among other things.In the following year he courted Frances Wightman in London.He became an Inspector of Schools.His wedding ceremony took place at Teddington.His new life was hectic and obscure.In 1851 England had no system of state education.Arnold was one of twenty inspectors.He had a practice not to speak out against contemporaries although he thought Tennyson decorative, not penetrative.James Froude was a sympathetic reviewer of Arnold's poetry.He gained a five year Oxford Poetry Professorship.He wrote Rugby Chapel as a tribute to the memory of his father.In the 1860's Arnold built his reputation as a metropolitan savant. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sweetness and Light
This book is a nicely written (sweetness) and insightful (light) exploration of, well, just what the title says, Matthew Arnold and Christianity. Debunking the charge by T.S. Eliot and others that Arnold was a spiritual dilettante, Livingston convincingly demonstrates the high seriousness of Arnold's spiritual quest and religious writings. In doing so he carefully explores Arnold's own distinctive and highly individual religiosity while contextualizing it relative to the Liberal Protestantism and the Catholic Modernism of Arnold's day--all while also touching on its relationship to certain later theological movements of the twentieth century, many of which do indeed seem to find in it a forerunner. Scholarly and accessible in the best senses. ... Read more

Book Description
Matthew Arnold (1822-88), the leading man-of-letters of the Victorian age, has been the decisive influence on modern thinking about literature and criticism and his work has become an inescapable cultural reference point today. In this stylish and entertaining book Stefan Collini examines the whole range of Arnold's literary, social, and religious criticism as well as his poetry, placing them in the context of the major intellectual controversies of the nineteenth century. By attending to the distinctive power of Arnold's writing to charm, tease, persuade, and irritate, the book provides a brilliant characterization of the tone and temper of his mind. This edition includes a substantial Afterword which reflects on Arnold's continuing polemical significance and his role in contemporary cultural debate. ... Read more

Book Description
The only recent critical biography of this quintessential Victorian poet and critic who proposed that poetry should replace religion as a way to "interpret life, console, and sustain us." ... Read more

Book Description