Matthew Arnold, born December 24, 1822, was the second of nine children born to Thomas and Mary Arnold. As a child he became acquainted with Wordsworth, another noted literary figure of the Victorian Era, who was his neighborhood in the Lake District of England. For his education, Arnold attended Winchester College and then the Rugby School, of which his father was the headmaster, and then received a scholarship to the Balliol College at Oxford in 1841. In 1849 Arnold published his first book of poetry titled The Strayed Reveler, which was not highly regarded by critics of the time. Because of his initial limited success as a writer, Arnold took a position of Inspector of Schools for the royal government in order to earn a living. With this living, Arnold married Frances Lucy, who bore him six children. Though he thought of his job as a school inspector to be “drudgery,” it allowed him to travel the countryside and become more familiar with it than any other author of the time.

In addition to being a poet, Matthew Arnold was also a literary critic. Arnold began this job in 1853 with the publication of his “Preface to Poems.” In 1857 he was appointed to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, and was subsequently elected for a second five year term. Arnold was the first Professor of Poetry at Oxford to lecture in English rather than Latin. During his Professorship, Arnold published his On Translating Homer in 1861 and his Last Words on Translating Homer. Though his poems were not highly regarded during his time, his literary criticism was, as he developed an official methodology for literary criticism which was a mix between the historicist approach and a personal essay. Arnold based his criticism on the criteria o if the work contained “high truth” and “high seriousness.” Shakespeare and Milton were the basis of comparison as possession both “high truth” and “high seriousness” while Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales did not warrant acclaim. Believing that poetry should be the “criticism of life,” Arnold moved from literary criticism to political criticism, where his major social criticism work was his Culture and Anarchy. In addition to branching into social criticism, Arnold also ventured into religious criticism, where his major work was Literature and Dogma. Not a religious man, Arnold thought of Christianity in the same light as Greek Mythology, and did not believe in a “God.” However, Arnold did enjoy the ritualistic and poetic nature of religion.

Though a noted critic himself, Arnold is criticized as not having many original ideas of his own, and being highly influenced by the ideas of other strong minds of his time. Arnold was most highly influenced by Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and Cardinal Newman. Nevertheless, Matthew Arnold did produce several highly regarded poems which cross between the Romantic and Modern styles because of their descriptions of nature along with their pessimism. Thought of as the third great Victorian poet after Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold died on April 15, 1888.