The Better Part
Matthew Arnold (born December 24, 1822, Laleham, Middlesex, England—died April 15, 1888, Liverpool) English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class), and the “Populace.” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy (1869). His literary career -- leaving out the two prize poems -- had begun in 1849 with the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems by A., which attracted little notice -- although it contained perhaps Arnold's most purely poetical poem "The Forsaken Merman" -- and was soon withdrawn. Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (among them "Tristram and Iseult"), published in 1852, had a similar fate. In his poetry he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems from Senancour's Obermann. His greatest defects as a poet stem from his lack of ear and his frequent failure to distinguish between poetry and prose. His significant if curious estimate of his own poems in 1869 was that they represented "on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century."