SOURCE: An introduction to The English Poets: Chaucer to Donne, Vol. I, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward, 1880. Reprint by Macmillan Company, 1920, pp. xviixlvii.

Although Arnold was a poet and a commentator on the social and moral life in England, he was essentially an apologist for literary criticism. In the following summary, recognized as the quintessential nineteenth-century view of Pope, he discusses the poet and his literary predecessor, John Dryden, as writers of classic English prose, not poetry.

Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it, but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming...