Matthew Arnold (redirected from M Arnold)

Arnold, Matthew 

Born Dec. 24, 1822, in Laleham, Middlesex; died Apr. 15, 1888, in Liverpool. English poet, educator, and art critic.

Arnold made his debut with such poems as “Tristram and Iseult,” “Balder Dead,” “Empedocles on Etna,” and “Sohrab and Rustum.” As a critic he wrote about the hostility of bourgeois reality to art (the collection Culture and Anarchy, 1869; the book Literature and Dogma, 1873). In his essays he contrasted the prosaic thought of the bourgeois common man to the high, educative aim of literature, which is filled with the ideas of beauty, truth, and good. Arnold was one of the first in England to recognize the greatness of L. N. Tolstoy as a realist critical of those in power (the article “Count Leo Tolstoy,” 1887). Tolstoy, in his turn, feeling that Arnold was a like-minded thinker, included excerpts of Arnold’s works in his own Circle of Reading. Arnold’s most important works are collected in the book Essays in Criticism (series 1–2, 1865, 1888).

WORKS

The Complete Prose Works, vols. 1–5. Edited by Professor R. H. Super. Ann Arbor, 1960–65.
In Russian translation:
“Zadachi sovremennoi kritiki.” Vestnik Evropy, 1902, book 6.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 3. Moscow, 1958. Pages 33–37.
Jump, J. D. Matthew Arnold. London, 1955.
Duffln, H. C. Arnold the Poet. London, [1962].
Anderson, W. D. Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition. Ann Arbor, 1965.
Stange, G. R. Matthew Arnold: The Poet as Humanist. Princeton [N. J.], 1967.

B. A. GILENSON