English poet & critic (1822-1888)
Style ... is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"On the Study of Celtic Literature"
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
On Translating Homer
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature and Dogma
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
introduction, English Poets
This truth--to prove, and make thine own:
Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Isolation"
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?--
Most men eddy about
Here and there--eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die--
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Rugby Chapel
Round me too the night
In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
I feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;
I feel her finger light
Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; --
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Thyrsis
Pindar and Sophocles--as we all so glibly, and often with so little discernment of the real import of what we are saying--had not many books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise--in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Essays
A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays in Criticism, Second Series
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
Time gives his hour-glass
Its due reversal.
Their hour is gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"To an Independent Preacher"
We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Empedocles on Etna
Grey time-worn marbles
Hold the pure Muses.
In their cool gallery,
By yellow Tiber,
They still look fair.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"God and the Bible"
The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Literature and Dogma
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well -- but 'tis not true!
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
The hour, whose happy
Unalloy'd moments
I would eternalise,
Ten thousand mourners
Well pleased see end.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"To a Friend"