On Matthew Arnold

Opining some poems and other nonfiction essays by an under-appreciated classicist

“At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms, and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism.”

This article is the first in this series of semi-biographical works where I have felt obliged to include the full name of the author. Matthew Arnold is hardly a household name, and having a common first name as a surname creates even more ambiguity. So far, the justification of the authors I have covered has been generally self-evident; Kafka, Goethe, and Heine have all had major impacts on the western world that have not fully translated over to the average American household in terms of importance. I do, broadly speaking, have a plan of how to proceed outside of Germany, but I felt it best to begin a trilogy of articles on authors who wrote in our common tongue with the most obscure. I have encountered Matthew Arnold at a number of different points in my life: first through reading exegesis and commentaries on the works of Homer, then through educational research on foreign attitudes on America, and lastly I had stumbled upon a collection of his poetry at a book sale at the beginning of the pandemic that I bought because I recognized his name. 

This collection was the deciding factor in whether Arnold’s poetry was suitable for an entry in this series in the first place. I don’t like the idea of releasing something covering exclusively academic or nonfiction works; not only is it not fun to read, but it’s dreadful to write. I had already known of Arnold’s classical chops, but reading poems like Fragment of an “Antigone” and Philomela that show appreciation for the ancient masters won me over. Mycerinus imagines a speech by the grandson of the pharaoh Cheops from the sparse account of Herodotus¹ and opines on how awful it must be to live with knowledge of the injustices of one’s kin while also being fated to die before the mistakes can be corrected. The last couplet of Dover Beach, likewise, is similar to translations of Thucydides’ account of the battle of Epipolae.² He even complains like Juvenal about the state of Rome in New Rome.³ It is equally as impressive to construct Ovidian⁴ epistles of long-dead figures and to pull such small similes from the tomes of history books. Arnold deserves more praise for that alone.