SOURCE: “Arnold,” in Victorian Thinkers, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 27-47.

In the following essay, Collini surveys Arnold's poetic achievements, focusing on such works as “Empedocles on Etna,” the Switzerland poems, and “Dover Beach.”

Page one of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna: A Dramatic Poem.”

The collected prose works of Matthew Arnold occupy eleven fat volumes; the complete poetry, even when fleshed out with notes, variants, and appendices, fits easily into one volume in any of the several modern editions in which it has appeared. Though any rounded account of his achievement must to some extent reflect these proportions, such crude quantities tell us little about the relative value or enduring appeal of his various compositions in the two genres. In fact, the reputation of his poetry has been more stable and more generally favourable over the past hundred years than that of his prose, even though, as I...