THE STUDY OF POETRY – MATTHEW ARNOLD

Nutshell:

Ø  Poetry alone possesses the power to sustain us. For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Ø  Poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.

Ø  Wordsworth defines it as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”.

Ø  Science will incomplete without poetry.

Ø  Poetry can console us, sustain us, and interpret life to us. Without poetry, religion and philosophy are too hollow.

Ø  Poetry must possess a higher order of excellence.

Ø  Poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Ø  In reading poetry, strength, joy, excellency should be felt. For transparent reading, we have to know about Historic estimate which supports the idea of the poets of the past, and the personal estimate which deals with the moderns.

Ø  Historic climate hammers the judgments while evaluating the ancient poets, because the praise he recorded in his age mislead the perception on particular poetry.

Ø  If the poet is a real classic, we must read it with open eyes, and should not bear in mind about the poet’s excellence.

Ø  We must use real estimate to get the clear idea about the poem.

Ø  The exaggerations due to the personal estimate paved the way for abusing the language.

Ø  Arnold suggests the touch stone method to judge the value of poetry in an unbiased manner.

Ø  We should have in our minds lines and expressions of the great masters- Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and Homer- to other poets’ works as touchstone to draw the best in poetry.

Ø  The lines and expressions of great minds enable us to weigh the highest poetical qualities.

Ø  According to Arnold, it is better to have concrete examples in the form of touchstone-lines before us than to have recourse to abstract principles.

Ø  The characters of a high quality of poetry are in the substance and matter and the style and manner of poetry.

Ø  The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.

Ø  The superiority of matter and manner, substance and form are closely related; in the absence of one, the other is also wanting.

Ø  To expose the fallacies of applying historical climate, Arnold takes up the fourteenth century English literature, particularly the poetry of Chaucer.

Ø  According to Arnold, Though Chaucer is superiority in substance, gives real poetical importance,  and  has superiority of style and manner in his writings, he is not considered as great classics. Arnold considers his writings require a high and excellent seriousness as of a Dante, a Shakespeare or a Homer.

Ø  Arnold agrees that the real English is born with him, and that it has the truth of substance and virtue of style, to rank him in the highest ranks of poets is, according to Arnold, a critical fallacy.

Ø  In judging the Elizabethan poetry, we find Shakespeare and Milton the real classics.

Ø  Arnold evaluates the prose and poetry of Dryden.

Ø  The age of Dryden produced classics beyond its predecessors.

Ø  Addison compares Dryden with Chaucer.

Ø  Arnold questions: are Pope and Dryden real poetical classics?

Ø  Both Wordsworth and Coleridge denied this place to Pope and Dryden.

Ø  Arnold places both Pope and Dryden in the classics of English prose.

Ø  Arnold extols Gray as the poetical classic of that age. Though he is the frailest and scantiest of classics, yet he is classic.

Ø  Arnold evaluates Burns poetry, he finds that latter’s poetical quality is not in his English poems but in his scotch poems.

Ø  In Burns’s poem we can find his glory of human equality and independence,the dignity of man, and the application of ideas to life. But this is not enough for highest order of poetry, still it requires poetic truth and poetic beauty, and high seriousness.

Ø  The Real climate alone bring to us the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic.