SOURCE: Wimsatt, William K., Jr. “The Arnoldian Prophecy.” In Literary Criticism: A Short History, edited by William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, pp. 432-51. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

In the following excerpt, Wimsatt provides the background for Arnold's emergence as the most important literary critic of his generation.

Feeling and Image came through the eighteenth century, as we have seen, in close liaison, and they enjoyed at the dawn of the new era a high estate together. Feeling was somewhat indiscriminately treated as either something that welled up in the poet himself or (it made little difference) something that was discernible in the poem or in its images. Among the poetic genres, lyric had moved into the normative place. Or the broader and simpler concept of “poem” (or “poetry,” in the soul of the poet) was the norm—it mattered not what “order of composition” the...