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Matthew Arnold: 
"My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet, because  I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs." 

Matthew Arnold in a letter to his mother, 1869



To A Friend 
Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?-  
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,  
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen, 
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind. 

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won, 
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis 
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son 
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his 

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, 
From first youth tested up to extreme old age, 
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; 

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; 
The mellow glory of the Attic stage, 
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.  		POEMS ONLINE 
  •  Bacchanalia 
  •  The Buried Life 
  •  Consolation 
  •  Dover Beach 
  •  The Buried Life
  •  The Forsaken Merman 
  •  The Future 
  •  The Last Word
  •  Immortality 
  •  Isolation: To Marguerite 
  •  Lines Written in Kensington Gardens 
  •  Memorial Verses April 1850 
  •  Morality 
  •  Mycerinus 
  •  Obermann Once More 
  •  Palladium 
  •  Philomela 
  •  Requiescat 
  •  Rugby Chapel 
  •  Self-Dependence 
  •  Shakespeare 
  •  Sohrab and Rustum 
  •  Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 
  •  The Scholar-Gipsy 
  •  Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough 
  •  To Marguerite: Continued 
  •  Worldly Place 
  •  Youth and Calm 
FURTHER READING: 
  • Ilana Blumberg on Matthew Arnold, "Function of Criticism"
  • Irving Babbit on Matthew Arnold
  • Matthew Arnold & Percy William Bunting: Some New Letters
BOOKS:
A Life of Matthew Arnold
by Nicholas Murray
Hardcover, 416 pages
St Martins Press, March 1, 1997

The New York Times Book Review, James R. Kincaid:               
. . . A Life of Matthew Arnold, by Nicholas Murray . . . gives us the finest picture yet of Arnold as a playful and poised ironist, against-the-grain social critic, mocker of the knowing and the smug. Even more important, he gives us Arnold as a quick-fingered unraveler of deep-woven cultural patterns, as deft as any of today's politicized deconstructionists--and much funnier. . . . Mr. Murray's biography gives us new access to this spirit and to Arnold's lifelong attempt to move us to other spheres, to teach us, even through his melancholy poetry, that sweetness and light are not sterile elitist attitudes but tools for confronting cheap contentment, heedlessness and bigotry. 
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