Matthew Arnold Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Grob

Critical Essay by Alan Grob

SOURCE: “Arnold's ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’: The Use and Abuse of History,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 149-74.

In the following essay, Grob contends that Arnold's later poetry and his prose represent a fundamental break from a “predominantly metaphysical mode … of explanation” of the human condition to a philosophy of cyclical history that was closely aligned with prevailing Victorian intellectual tendencies.

After the publication in 1849 of The Strayed Reveller, And Other Poems, Arnold's poetry conceptually underwent something of a midcourse correction, a tentatively taken turn from predominantly metaphysical modes of explanation for our unhappy human predicament to what clearly seems a more overtly historicist analysis of our situation, a turn, it should be added, that brought Arnold as poet and later as prose writer more closely in line with the prevailing intellectual tendencies of the Victorian age. In “Resignation,” a kind of philosophic summing up...
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