THE STUDY OF POETRY MATTHEW ARNOLD VICTORIAN LITERATURE CAN

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The Study of Poetry- Matthew Arnold

Victorian Literature can be considered as a socio-cultural documentary of Victorian life and society. The intellectual battles between the Neo-Classical School of criticism and the romantic school which began in the 18th Century lasted till the early 19th Century. It was during this period a new group of critics emerged with Matthew Arnold (1822-88) on the centre stage declaring his intentions to exactly define the function of criticism at the present time in his book Essays in Criticism.

Arnold was a professor of poetry at Oxford and wrote three influential critical works which established him as a major English critic of the 19th century. The three books entitle Translating Homer, The Study of Celtic Literature and Essays in Criticism deal with the writing of poetry and the problems of criticism. Arnold was influenced by tow important French critics of his time, Taine and Sainte-Beuve and like his mentors attempted to determine and dictate literary taste.

Taine’s grand theory of the creative act or literature as a product of ‘race, milieu, moment, or combination of psychic and social forces is regarded as a sociological criticism of literature. Any aspiring critics had to keep these three factors in mind in order to make a correct interpretation of a writer’s work.

Arnold saw in this method a critical programme possessing a scientific temper and a rigorous approach characterized by disinterestedness and exactness. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, he defined criticism as “a disinterested that is known and though in the world”. Arnold’s distinguished contemporaries were Carlyle, Ruskin, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Pater and Wilde subscribed to the romantic view of ‘art for art’s sake’ while Carlyle and Ruskin were moralists who believed in the Neo-Classical tradition of ‘art for life’s sake’.

Arnold adopted a balance between these two extremes. He rejected an overtly didactic approach in poetry but emphasized the fact that poetry ought to be a ‘Powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life—to the question: how to life? Arnold wrote in The Study of Poetry (1880):

Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”.

Commenting on this key passage, George Watson remarks that, “For Arnold it was obvious that poetry and religion are aspects of a wider entity called ‘Culture’ or the total current of ideas in which a given society lives. They are, for Arnold different version of human awareness of the human condition”. This statement was attacked later by T.S Eliot as Arnold’s insensible attempt to substitute poetry for religion.

Arnold had a few theoretical preconceptions of poetry and criticism. The true subject of poetry according to him is “an excellent action which appeals to the great primary human affection”. The highest form of poetry is found in Greek tragedy that contains actions that please always and please all. Momentary actions with passing value were relegated to comic poets.

The greatest poetry for Arnold deal with subjects or actions that “most powerfully appeal to those elementary feeling which are independent of time”. Arnold declared that Sophocles in Greece and Shakespeare in England are the best models of poetry for all times. Shakespeare is a name never to be mentioned without reverence. He chooses excellent subjects and knew well what constituted a poetical action. In Arnold’s judgement, great poetry possesses a grand style which produces delight as a whole, not in part, even when it deals with a tragic subject. His exposition on the grand style is carefully defined in the study of poetry:

The grand style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

(study of poetry contains total 10 pages)




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