Matthew Arnold as a Poet and Critic

Amal Mohaya AlRekabi

Course : Poetry

Matthew Arnold as a Poet and Critic

The word "criticism" is derived from a Greek word that means "judgment". So, criticism is basically the exercise of judgment, and literary criticism is, therefore, the exercise of judgment on works of literature. From this, it is clear that the nature of literary criticism is to examine a work of literature, and its function is to identify its points of excellence and its inadequacies, and finally to evaluate its artistic worth.

Literary criticism concerns itself with asking philosophical questions about the nature of imaginative literature. It is not just surfing the literary text for answering questions about the syntactical or semantic structures of the sentences composing that literary work. It is probing deep into the being of a literary text and seeing how, if at all, it enlivens the spirit of the writer in relation to what is around him.

During the first half of the twentieth century, literary critics became aware and conscious of the interaction between the past and the present. The interests of the critics ranged from the poetics of Plato and Aristotle, through the theory and criticism of the Renaissance, and to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were most deeply indebted to the nineteenth century.

Of all earlier literary movements, Romanticism is most important for modern criticism. Romanticism reacted against the Neoclassicism, represented by the critics of the eighteenth century. Critics in the early twentieth century, revolted against the oppressive Victorian aesthetic and social conventions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold are the two principal leaders of the English Romantic Movement, who powerfully affec...

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...s a whole. When I say as a whole it means that he relates all types of institutes collaborating together in shaping the human being. Therefore, the lost of the ideal figure , hero and the model they couldn't find, so together with his interest in the classical made him in The Scholar Gipsy go back to the novel written by Glanville. The poem is build on the story he read in Glenville's book. He believed that there is a kind of continuity in history, cultural development and the journey of life. When I say continuity I'm referring to the 19th century critical poet Arnold as part of his time because all poet and writers believed in the element of continuity, the link between the past and the present, the stability, the center that affects, so the relation between things and the stability and continuity that leads to a presence coherent, harmony and stability of mind.