SOURCE: Pratt, Linda Ray. “Empedocles, Suicide, and the Order of Things.” Victorian Poetry 50, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1988): 75-90.

In the following essay, Pratt examines Matthew Arnold's response to Empedocles's legendary suicide.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) 

from “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens¹

When Matthew Arnold wrote that he was “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” he referred to a lost world in which he imagined he would have felt at peace and to a new world in which he thought he could not live. Unable to think how he could “grow in other ground” or “flower in foreign air,” he chooses in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” to stay in the “desert” of the old-world abbey's cloistered shade. Arnold's metaphor of wandering between two worlds is...