Spence Farmer

Charles Conaway

British Literature

20 April 2020

Matthew Arnold and The Victorian Era

After a surge of creativity from the Romantic authors, the Victorian era ushered in a

tumultuous and somewhat indefinite time for English literature. Among the authors who

contended with the rapid changes in technology and thought was Matthew Arnold. Interestingly,

our book characterizes Arnold as an anti-Victorian figure among his peers, despite his

foundations built on a “characteristically Victorian presupposition” about the malleability and

problematic nature of the Puritan middle class (Greenblatt 813). Arnold’s work spans about four

decades, starting in the 1850’s, in which most of his poetic work was produced, and ending in the

1880’s, at which point, Arnold was almost exclusively authoring essays of literary criticism. His

work places him in both the mid and late Victorian eras. Arnold’s body of work tackles issues of

the human heart, the intrinsic meaning of language, and the value of poetry and criticism.

Matthew Arnold’s poetry and his eventual abandonment of poetic authorship in favor of literary

and societal criticism evidence his role in late and mid Victorian era literature as an eclectic

product of preceding Romantic thought and the anticipation of Modernism, and as a defender of

poetry’s value in the face of a technological revolution.

In the poem The Buried Life, Arnold diagnoses the human inability to authentically

communicate as an intentioned move on the part of “Fate”. He proposes the genuine essence of a

person must be too valuable to be exposed to the frivolities and carelessness of humankind, and

thus, it must remain “buried” within each person, too deep to obtain. This elusiveness is the
cause for humanity’s relentless digging and longing as they search for articulation of their own

nature.

Arnold finds himself, with his contemporaries, on the verge of a “communication crisis”

in the Victorian era. As many traditional, societal values crumbles, and a radically nebulous

approach to literature begins to emerge in Modernism, Arnold must contend with language’s

unprecedented reconceptualization. Arnold’s poetry seems to act as an early steppingstone on his

journey of negotiation with the transitional period of literature he inhabited.

In The Buried Life, Arnold not only mourns the generally inarticulate nature of

personhood, he also poses the question: is there a solution for the universal longing? Arnold’s

answer spawns from Romantic values but can contend with its opposition in the emerging

Modernist worldview. With tentative but pragmatic optimism, Arnold answers his own question

with a “yes”. The solution to the universal melancholy is vague, intangible, and hopelessly out of

our own control, but Arnold claims it exists.

It exists, according to the final stanza of The Buried Life, in the reciprocated affectionate

relationship. For Arnold, human love and emotion still possess a transcendent power to create

clarity and peace for the individual grappling with existence. This conclusion is evidence of

Arnold’s place in the Victorian Era. He still holds some confidence in the power of emotion -

conceptually abstracted, this could be understood as nature itself - to bring respite and truth to

the individual. The respite is derived from the intrinsic meaning of a natural order – an axiom

under attack by modernist perspectives that lingers in Arnold’s poetry.

Biographically, Arnold worked tirelessly in defense of poetry’s value and

democratization. This has much to do with his period’s affinity for the up and coming “novel”

genre. The late Victorian era was marked by an unprecedented diaspora of literature as regular
publications took hold of the public. Literacy rates soared during the Victorian era because of the

revolutionary technological progress (Greenblatt 544).

Rapidly, a high expectation mounted for the didactic and entertainment value of a new

breed of periodical literature: “Readers shared the expectation that literature would not only

delight but instruct, that it would be continuous with the lived world, and that it would illuminate

social problems” (Greenblatt 545). This, in tandem with his own high standard for effective

poetry, caused Arnold to abandon the poetic genre altogether in favor of essay style

argumentation and critique.

Arnold is explicit with his high regard for poetry’s utility as the sole source to “interpret

life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” (Greenblatt 548). However, Arnold believed that poetry

and criticism shared a symbiotic relationship to one another. Analytical criticism and historical

knowledgeability equipped the modern poet with a robust schema from which they could create

truly masterful poetry. Arnold, in fact, complained that the Romantic poets didn’t feed from an

adequately deep literary background to construct effective poetry; better criticism was his

proposed solution.

Arnold’s valorizing of criticism, however, was always in service to poetry itself. In The

Functions of Criticism at the Present Time, Arnold elaborates on his view of criticism in

relationship to poetry. He’s quick to establish that the “critical faculty is lower than the

inventive,” rebutting opponents who worried he was lifting criticism above creative pursuits.

However, he continues by arguing, in response to Romanticism’s “spontaneous generation”

approach to poetic inspiration, that “the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and

exposition, not of analysis and discovery” (Arnold 831).

 For Arnold, the poet is a curator of ideas, combining and building from a rich literary

history. In this, he firmly removes himself from the Romantic view of poetic inspiration.

Additionally, he concludes that the pervasive, low view of criticism comes predominantly from

poor criticism. Arnold defines poor criticism, in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,

as “controversial” and “polemical” work (Arnold 839). Arnold’s aim is to de-politicize criticism

and to reorient its goal back to its original purpose: to help the “mind dwell upon what is

excellent in itself…” (Arnold 839). For Arnold, criticism is a matter of personal betterment and

literary refinement, not an analysis of timely power struggles.

Matthew Arnold was a unique poet in that, historically, he cared for poetry in the abstract

more than his own works. He saw a deficit in his own ability to produce wholly effective poems,

however, he still revered poetry as the highest form of literary art, worth propagating and

defending in the face of emergent, rival genres. This surely accounts for his work as a dedicated

defender of poetry and his pursuit to find resolution between Romantic and emerging Modernist

ideas.
 Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “The Buried Life.” Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th ed., vol. 2,

edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al, Norton, 2019, pp. 814–816.

Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Norton Anthology of English

Literature, 10th ed., vol. 2, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al, Norton, 2019, pp. 829–

844.

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. “Matthew Arnold.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th

ed., vol. 2, Norton, 2019, pp. 809–814.

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. “The Victorian Age.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature,

10th ed., vol. 2, Norton, 2019, pp. 527–551.