Arnold’s poetry and the modern world [Archives:2006/933/Education]

Dr. Syed M. Khurshid Anwar
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Science and Technology, Sana'a
[email protected]
How is a full and enjoyable life to be lived in the modern industrial society? This was the recurrent theme in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, one of the leading poets of the Victorian age. The question looms large over his poetry. Arnold's mode of posing such questions may not always satisfy us, his answers may sometimes be simply wrong. But what is less excusable as he himself said of Ruskin, is that he could not only be wrong but also dogmatic when he was wrong. On the whole, however, his writings have fared well with posterity. ” The misapprehensiveness of his age is exactly what a poet is sent to remedy “, wrote Browning (1812-1889). Oddly enough it is to Arnold's work rather than to Browning's that the statement seems more appropriate. And its applicability to Arnold has persisted from Victorian times to ours in part because the “misapprehensiveness”” has also persisted. Of all the Victorian writers