The most characteristic work of the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) deals with the difficulty of preserving personal values in a world drastically transformed by industrialism, science, and democracy. Matthew Arnold was born at...

A master of both poetry and prose, Matthew Arnold remains significant today for the same reasons that the Victorian age as a whole retains significance. The Victorians—Arnold chief among them—struggled with issues that confront us more than...

Among the major Victorian writers sharing in a revival of interest and respect in the second half of the twentieth century, Matthew Arnold is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his prose. Only a quarter of his productive...

Arnold, Matthew(1822–1888) Matthew Arnold, the English poet and social and literary critic, was the son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby. Matthew Arnold was educated at Winchester and Rugby and entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1841....

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to Tom Arnold, literary professor,...

IN HIS poem, "Rugby Chapel", Matthew Arnold remembered his father as "a mighty oak". His father, Thomas Arnold, immortalised in the novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and in Lytton Strachey's portrait in "Eminent Victorians", is probably the most famous English public-school headmaster. He was...

Perhaps the Reverend Dr Arnold, Head Master of Rugby School near Birmingham, would be a proper person. He is one of the most enlightened and liberal of our clergy.... John Stuart Mill, letter of 6 December 1831 (1) ON APRIL 5,...

ON CHESIL BEACHBy Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 208 pages, $22 As far as I can tell, there’s not a single weak sentence in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. O.K., it’s a very short novel and we’re cruising familiar territory—love gone wrong—but I still think...

For reasons I can’t explain, science fiction has always sent me to sleep. Perhaps it’s because I find living in the present scary enough. The pleasures of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic work—let alone H.G. Wells’—have passed me by. Even Truffaut’s film of Mr. Bradbury’s 1953 classic,...

In the following essay, Sterner studies Arnold's conception of culture and the implications of this ideal for his evaluation of modernity.

In the following essay, Gossman claims that Arnold's criticisms of “Hebraism” obscure a vision of society that is inclusive of both culture and religion and that his work cannot be equated with antisemitism.

In the following essay, Stone claims that despite Arnold's largely unfavorable view of American culture, he appealed to American intellectuals and that his philosophy has been an inspiration for many American pragmatists, including John Dewey and William James.