SOURCE: “The Great Work of Criticism,” in Poetry in the Age of Democracy: The Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold, University Press of Kansas, 1989, pp. 103-34.

In the following essay, Schneider reviews the major themes in Arnold's Essays in Criticism, including the role of literary criticism, modernity, and the distinctive natures of poetry and prose.

When Arnold collected the best of his articles for Essays in Criticism (1865), he wrote an introductory essay that in its general theory sought to explain his own recent criticism and to work out new answers to the old questions. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” asserted once more his faith that the intellectual movements of the Enlightenment were returning to full vigor and that free inquiry in all branches of human knowledge was promising once more to sweep away the old and false ideas. In this essay, however, in setting out a...