How Matthew Arnold Differs from other Victorian Poets
How Matthew Arnold Differs from other Victorian Poets
Matthew Arnold, poet and critic was undoubtedly an eminent Victorian. His poetry represented its age in far profounder way. The Victorian age is one of the most remarkable periods in the history of inland. It was an era of material prosperity, political consciousness, dramatic reforms, industrial and mechanical progress, scientific advancement social unrest, educational expansion and religions uncertainly. Against such a background, the poets, the novelists and the essayist of this age wielded this profile pen to portray the panorama of life as observed by them. In the field of poetry Tennyson and Browning are said to represent this age in their poetical works. Arnold, though not considered equal to them, also represents this age in his poems. But the tone of his poetry and his attitude to life as expressed in his poems are completely different from those of Tennyson and browning.
Tennyson, Browning and Arnold are great poets; each in his individual way each of them represents one tendency or the other of the Victorian mind. While Tennyson is euphoric about the materiel port of the Victorian society, Arnold is pacifically conscious about the confusion and tension of the age. Browning on the other hand pursued an orthodox attitude toward Christianity and chose to deal with the psychological problems of men and women. Arnold is completely different from both Tennyson and Browning in his attitude towards life, his sentimentality as well as his passionate love for nature.
Life to Arnold appears to be fall of darkness and gloom and he feels like a benighted traveler in a foreign land without any light of hope:
“ And we are here on a darkling plain swept with confused alarm of
Struggle on where ignorant armies clash by night”
This feeling of misery and melancholy throbs practically in every poem of Arnold. To him the world is a vale of tears, not of hope visualized by Tennyson and Browning. It is a place to snuffer, not to enjoy as desorbed
By Tennyson in his poem Ulysses. In wres Beach, the world is represented as a dreamy desert. The sea of faith has ebbed and there is nothing lent sadness and misery.
Both Tennyson and Browning behaved inn the possibilities of man. Tennyson in his Ulysses says:
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