SOURCE: “Love Poetry: Sincerity and Subversive Voices,” in Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, University Press of Virginia, 1988, pp. 163-203.

In the following essay, Riede discusses Arnold's love poetry and his frustration with the inadequacy of human speech.

The conventions and consolatory purposes of elegy put enormous pressure on poetic language to say the utmost that can be said about life, death, and the hereafter. Indeed, elegy tempts the poet to say more than can be justly said, excuses the flattering fictions and the consoling lie. Similarly, love poetry involves sets of conventions that may tempt the poet to excess, to flattery, seductive deception of the beloved, and even self-deception. The love poem is, in one tradition, a tissue of transparent fictions, specious logic, and false spirituality designed seriously to woo or playfully to seduce—the beloved is a divinity, love is eternal, union is paradise. An...