Encyclopedia

Matthew Arnold

Also found in: Dictionary, Medical, Wikipedia.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mentioned in
References in periodicals archive
(2) Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Boynton's '"Things that are outside ourselves': Ethnology, Colonialism, and the Ontological Critique of Capitalism in Matthew Arnold's Criticism."
And here Matthew Arnold finds a model for the marriage of poetry to experience in the aftermath of profound disillusion.
Graham Moore, director of P2 Technologies, said: "We are delighted to be working with Matthew Arnold and Baldwin.
In a sense, Quart is a descendant of a tradition begun in the mid-19th century by Marx and Engels on the left and Matthew Arnold on the right, the soi-disant voice in the moral wilderness excoriating the base appetites of an emerging commercial culture.
The Barfield of Diener's study is a young intellectual wrestling not with original and final participation, polarity, logomorphism, chronological snobbery, the Residue of Unresolved Positivism (RUP), and the evolution of consciousness but with economic issues, the nature of consumption, contemporary manifestations of philosophical dualism, the future of leisure, Matthew Arnold's concept of culture, Lost Generation pessimism, industrial development, advertising, and the promise of technology.
Trilling thought he detected the same expectations in the great liberal writers of nineteenth-century Britain, such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, with whom he began his career as a college professor and literary critic.
Dulack's two acts of sophisticated banter--garnished with references to Matthew Arnold, Buddenbrooks and Albania as "the next Cote D'Azur"--resemble a "blend of The Misanthrope and Art, with maybe some Alan Ayckbourn thrown in," in Mooy's words.
Eavan Boland spoke with real horror of Matthew Arnold's idea that poetry would substitute for religion in an age of unbelief, as if poetry were bound to behave like the Catholic Church given half a chance.
As faith receded--like the waves in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach"--society suffered what William James, in The Will to Believe, called "the sick shudder of frustrated religious demand." This demand was responsible, Wilson argues, for religion's recovery in the twentieth century.
"This far exceeded our expectations," says Matthew Arnold, senior vice president and chief operating officer of World Resources.
Set against scenes like these, in which physical assault serves as a metaphor for removing the threat posed by religious Dissent to the Victorian body politic--by the simple means of force and exclusion--the calm and civility that Matthew Arnold exhibits in his famous comments on Dissenters in Culture and Anarchy (1869) present, to say the least, a sharp contrast.
Copyright © 2003-2025 Farlex, Inc Disclaimer
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.