Arnold as a Poet of Victorian Conflict.

... Arnold as a Poet of Victorian Conflict Lord Alfred Tennyson, a consummate poetic artist, is regarded as the most representative poet of the Victorian age. That his poetry was an epitome of his time, that it exhibited the society, the art, the philosophy, the religion of his day, was proved by the welcome which all classes gave it. Though not a representative poet of the age, in the sense Tennyson was, Matthew Arnold, having an acute sense of his age, represented perhaps more truly than Tennyson, the contending, contemporary intellectual and religious ideas, the illogical contradictions in men's minds, the sick hurry and the divided aims, the shattered hopes and the spiritual distress of his age. Arnold's verse is a more truthful mirror of his mind and character than his prose. As Arnold himself writes in a letter to his mother in 1869-"My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of

want to read more? →