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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 a century later: social injustice, unequal educational opportunity, religious doubt, the uncertain role of the arts in the modern world, the restlessness and confusion of modern man. But Arnold's opinions on these issues differed from those of many of his countrymen. Surrounded by champions of British superiority, Arnold nonetheless refused to be satisfied with the accomplishments of nineteenth-century Englishmen. According to biographer Park Honan, when Arnold was only six months old, he seemed to his impatient father "backward and rather badtempered" because he would not lie still in his crib. For the rest of his life, Arnold's critics complained about his refusal to lie still—his unwillingness to be content with the signal achievements of the British.
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