Arnold’s poetry is the poetry of meditation and not the poetry of passion; it comes from “the depth and not the tumult of the soul”; it does not make us more joyful, but it helps us to greater depth of vision, greater detachment, greater power of self-possession.  Our concern here is chiefly with its relation to the prose, and this, too, is a definite and important relation.  In his prose Arnold gives such result of his observation and meditation as he believes may be gathered into the form of counsel, criticism, and warning to his age.  In his poetry, which preceded the prose, we find rather the processes through which he reached these conclusions; we learn what is the nature of his communing upon life, not as it affects society, but as it fronts the individual; we learn who are the great thinkers of the past who came to his help in the straits of life, and what is the armor which they furnished for his soul in its times of stress.

One result of a perusal of the poems is to counteract the impression often produced by the jaunty air assumed in the prose.  The real substance of Arnold’s thought is characterized by a deep seriousness; no one felt more deeply the spiritual unrest and distraction of his age.  More than one poem is an expression of its mental and spiritual sickness, its doubt, ennui, and melancholy.  Yet beside such poems as Dover Beach and Stagirius should be placed the lines from Westminster Abbey:—­

    For this and that way swings
    The flux of mortal things,
  Though moving inly to one far-set goal.

Out of this entanglement and distraction Arnold turned for help to those writers who seemed most perfectly to have seized upon the eternal verities, to have escaped out of the storm of conflict and to have gained calm and peaceful seats.  Carlyle and Ruskin, Byron and Shelley, were stained with the blood of battle, they raged in the heat of controversy; Arnold could not accept them as his teachers.  But the Greek poets and the ancient Stoic philosophers have nothing of this dust and heat about them, and to them Arnold turns to gather truth and to imitate their spirit.  Similarly, two poets of modern times, Goethe and Wordsworth, have won tranquillity.  They, too, become his teachers.  Arnold’s chief guides for life are, then, these:  two Greek poets, Sophocles and Homer; two ancient philosophers, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; two modern poets, Goethe and Wordsworth.

In Homer and Sophocles, Arnold sought what we may call the Greek spirit.  What he conceived this spirit to be as expressed in art, we find in the essay on Literature and Science, “fit details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived.”  In Sophocles, Arnold found the same spirit interpreting life with a vision that “saw life steadily and saw it whole.”  In another Greek idea, that of fate, he is also greatly interested, though his conception of it is modified by the influence of Christianity.  From the Greek poets, then, Arnold derived a sense of the large part which destiny plays in our lives and the wisdom of conforming our lives to necessity; the importance of conceiving of life as directed toward a simple, large, and noble end; and the desirability of maintaining a balance among the demands that life makes on us, of adapting fit details to the main purpose of life.