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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Study of Poetry, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Poetry and the Human Spirit
Excellence and Inferiority
Reason vs. Emotion
Elitism, Democracy, and Popular Culture
Summary
Analysis
Matthew Arnold quotes one of his own impassioned appeals, published a year prior, for society to give poetry a higher place in human affairs. While this quoted appeal is not specifically concerned with the primary topic of “The Study of Poetry”—what makes a poem good and why reading good poetry is necessary—it lays the foundation for Arnold’s arguments by making the case that poetry can be a unique solace in times of uncertainty. Alluding to the diminishing role of religions, creeds, and traditions of all kinds in modern life, Arnold explains that people should look to poetry to fill the gap left by these fading institutions. Religion, especially, Arnold argues, has been weakened by the advances of science; poetry, in contrast, belongs to the realm of ideas, and is thus resistant to the growing influence of the sciences.
Matthew Arnold’s long quotation from his own previous essay (another introduction, in this case to the book The Hundred Greatest Men) reveals two important things about his worldview. First, Arnold is preoccupied with the idea that human beings today need a source of support and consolation in their lives, and he is absolutely certain that poetry can provide it. More than that, he is certain that it is inevitable that poetry will provide it. Second, Arnold considers his era one of declining faith and fading traditions—hence the need for poetry and, it follows, for more attention to the proper ways to read it and reap the benefits of it. Both of these assumptions reveal Arnold’s underlying conviction that he was writing in a fallen era, a time of disillusionment and decreasing standards. Much of Arnold’s argument and tone can be explained by his posture towards his time, the stance of a man who is determined to defend the idea of “the very best,” which he sees in poetry, in a skeptical age. It is telling, also, that Arnold begins his essay with the rather bold decision to quote himself: since he embodies, to some extent, the standards he expects his readers to adopt, it would be false modesty to quote anyone else.
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Matthew Arnold explains that he had a good reason for quoting himself: this idea (that poetry can be a unique solace in a changing world) underlies everything he is going to write about in “The Study of Poetry.” Since “The Study of Poetry” was originally published as an introduction to an anthology of English poets, he adds that his task in this essay is specifically to follow one “great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry.” But whether readers are acquainting themselves with one type of poetry or with poetry of all types, Arnold contends, they should in all cases keep this idea in mind: that poetry has a unique role in modern life.
After acknowledging that it is a bit strange to begin an essay by quoting oneself, Matthew Arnold emphasizes that, in everything that follows, readers must remember the idea that poetry could play a vital role in the drastically changing landscape of society. Everything Arnold will write about in “The Study of Poetry” can be traced back to the supreme place poetry occupies in Arnold’s worldview. Next, Arnold addresses the purpose of the anthology that “The Study of Poetry” is intended to introduce, which is to allow readers to study the development of English poetry. Arnold uses the image of a great river (a “world-river”) fed by the tributaries of national poetic traditions to suggest to readers how he sees poetry: as a mighty, unstoppable force, always moving forward into the future, and the property of all humankind. This is significant, since some of the poets Arnold will use as touchstones for the highest standards of poetic art are not English but classics from other poetic traditions. Finally, Arnold makes it clear that, while this anthology is dedicated to English poetry, the same standards apply to all poetry regardless of national origin. Thus, Arnold’s view of poetry is rooted in a thoroughly international (if Eurocentric) philosophy of art.
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Next, Matthew Arnold makes it clear how highly he regards poetry as an art form. His contemporaries have not been thinking of poetry the right way, he argues. It has much more to offer than they give it credit for. In particular, it is “capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it.” Arnold predicts that, in the turbulence of modern life, we will come to find that we will have to rely on poetry “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.” Poetry will, in other words, become a necessity.
Matthew Arnold goes on to argue that even science, seemingly the opposite of poetry, will need poetry to continue developing. Without poetry, he writes, science will be incomplete. Arnold cites the English poet William Wordsworth, who asserted that poetry is “the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science”—in other words, poetry embodies the spirit of discovery and the passion for knowledge. Going further still, Arnold writes that religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry, since they are also becoming more and more based on reasoning rather than faith or mysticism, though with less success than the hard sciences. Soon religion and philosophy will serve no real purpose, Arnold claims, and people will wonder why they trusted these two old disciplines before turning to poetry for what philosophy and religion used to supply.
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Matthew Arnold goes on to explain that there is a corollary to the argument he has been making about poetry’s “high destiny”: if people are going to be turning to poetry to meet all these needs—to keep science moving forward and to replace religion and philosophy—it will have to be “poetry of a high order of excellence.” The standard for what counts as true poetry will have to be very high. For this reason, he asserts, readers must learn to discern good poetry from bad poetry and hold themselves to a “high standard” of critical judgment.
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Matthew Arnold illustrates what he means by these rigorous standards with an anecdote about an exchange between the literary critic Sainte Beuve and Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon hears someone spoken of as a charlatan, he accepts that the person might in fact be a charlatan, but counters that charlatanism (the use of tricks and deception to gain undeserved advantage) is everywhere. Sainte Beuve replies that this might be true in politics and government, but that charlatanism can have no place in the world of eternal art and thought, since the “noble portion of man’s being” is “inviolable.” Arnold adds that Sainte Beuve describes the situation well, and that readers should keep this idea in mind: that there are some things, such as poetry, that cannot tolerate charlatanism.
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Matthew Arnold specifies that charlatanism poses a specific threat to poetry: it causes people, whether willingly or not, to confuse good poetry with bad poetry. Charlatanism weakens or removes altogether the distinctions that matter in reading poetry: the distinctions between excellent qualities and poor qualities, between sound ideas and unsound ideas, and between truths and half-truths. This is especially impermissible with regard to poetry, since poetry will only be able to fulfill its high destiny if it is accompanied by a proper criticism of life, Arnold’s term for the moral force and profound truths the greatest poetry offers. Poetry that lacks this “criticism of life” and that, due to charlatanism or inattention, advances half-truths or unsound ideas, will not fulfill poetry’s destiny of providing the ultimate support in a complex world where other consolations have failed. Readers owe it to themselves to reject charlatanism and insist on poetry that offers a true “criticism of life” based on sound ideas.
Matthew Arnold returns to one of the purposes of this essay, which is to introduce an anthology of English poets. A collection of poems like the one this essay introduces, he writes, can offer a valuable service to readers, since it can give them a better sense of “the best in poetry.” However, there is a problem with anthologies: instead of the real estimate of “the best in poetry,” they can give readers false standards of judgment. The two false estimates readers must avoid, Arnold notes, are the historic estimate and the personal estimate.
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The historic estimate may seem appealing because, as Matthew Arnold admits, the historical development of a language (such as English) and an art form (such as poetry) is indeed interesting. Anthologies covering large time spans allow readers to consider poems next to other poems from other eras and thus encourage readers to think of poets and their works as stages in the evolution of an art form. This, Arnold contends, often causes us to overrate poets from the past. Poems that play an important role in the development of poetry may seem more important, in retrospect, than they actually are, according to the standards of pure poetry.
The other fallacy Matthew Arnold warns readers about is the personal estimate. Readers naturally gravitate towards poets they are fond of, and this fondness can cause them to rate these poets and their works more highly than they actually merit. These poems might be of great importance to the reader, but that does not mean they are of great importance in themselves. Readers have a tendency to “apply [to such poems] a language of praise which is quite exaggerated,” and Arnold seeks to warn them about this fallacy.
On the other hand, these fallacies are natural, Matthew Arnold reassures readers. Nothing is more natural, when reading an anthology, to pause over poems that one would not ordinarily spend any time on, or to think oneself an expert on obscure poets and then to chide the public for not taking an interest in them. Arnold points out that French critics of his era committed this error, in a way, by underrating an important genre of early French poetry, the court tragedy. While this genre is flawed, Arnold concedes, a French critic named Charles d’Héricault gets it wrong when he argues that the canonization of this early poetry has prevented critics from appraising it accurately. Arnold produces a long quote from d’Héricault’s argument, noting that there is much truth to what d’Héricault writes but that he goes too far in rejecting the idea of poetic greatness.
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The reason Charles d’Héricault goes too far, Matthew Arnold argues, is because a truly great poet should indeed be treated differently from other, lesser poets. Greatness must be recognized; if a great poet seems distant and godlike, that’s the way it should be. If a poet is weak, or falsely categorized with the great, then by all means, Arnold writes, readers can dispense with her or him. But if the poet belongs to the highest echelon, then the right thing to do, in Arnold’s view, is to “feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character.” Indeed, to do anything different is a hindrance to the task readers should set themselves, which is to understand the great poets’ work as deeply as possible.
This is not to say, Arnold clarifies, that there is no room for negative criticism in appraising the work of great poets. If a poet’s work falls below the highest standard, then this should be pointed out. However, this negative criticism, along with the work of exploring the minutiae of a writer’s life, should be subordinated to the reader’s primary task, which is “to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is truly excellent.” Arnold acknowledges that some might argue that the more we know about a great poet’s life, the better, but this is flawed reasoning, he replies: life is not long enough to get bogged down in details of secondary importance when there is great poetry to be read. Things would be different “if we lived as long as Methuselah,” he writes, but in our limited time on earth we owe it to ourselves to enjoy the best. Instead of creating distractions for themselves and overrating inferior works as a result, people should focus their efforts on the truly great poets.
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Returning to a previous point, Matthew Arnold admits that the format of an anthology creates temptations for readers and critics to fall into the historic estimate and the personal estimate, since anthologies present poets in their historical context and the critics assigned to present certain poets are sure to be fond of those poets. That is why it is worth reiterating the primary concern of the anthology: to establish the real estimate of a poem, and thus to reap the real benefits of poetry. Arnold quotes the Christian philosopher Thomas Kempis to this effect: “When you have read and learned many things, you should always return to the one principle.” No matter what an anthology presents us with, Arnold insists, we should keep the one principle—the real estimate of a poem—in mind.
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Adding to his previous explanation of the two fallacies (the historic estimate and the personal estimate), Arnold explains that the historical estimate is especially likely to be a problem when readers confront ancient works. Matthew Arnold acknowledges that there is not a great deal of harm in overrating ancient poets, but doing so degrades the language used to describe poetry and to make distinctions. For example, Arnold points out, a French critic (M. Vitet), in his determination to elevate the French epic poem The Song of Roland to the highest rank of poetry, uses language that is only appropriate for Homer. To show his readers the travesty of describing The Song of Roland in terms reserved for Homer, Arnold produces excerpts from the former and the latter. The difference in quality, he insists, is stark: “[With Homer] we are here in another world, another order of poetry altogether.”
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The kind of distortion that M. Vitet engages in, Matthew Arnold argues, threatens to deprive words of their proper meaning and to weaken the solidity of readers’ judgments. The antidote for readers is always to have in mind some lines written by the greatest poets so that they (readers) can use classic verses as a model for comparison. Such lines can be an “infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality.” All it takes is a line or two by a great poet, Arnold asserts, to help ascertain the quality of the poetry being compared.
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Matthew Arnold produces a number of examples to prove what kinds of lines he has in mind, including verses by Homer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. These examples, he insists, are enough in themselves to allow readers to produce “the real estimate” of a poem. This is because all of the examples Arnold has introduced possess “the highest poetical quality.” Readers who truly understand their power will be able to sense whether a given work shares in that power or not. Arnold adds that this is a more useful tool than it might seem; instead of trying to describe high-quality poetry abstractly, critics should use concrete examples, such as the ones Arnold has given, and point out where the evaluated poem shares the qualities of the greatest poems. Arnold remarks acidly that it is far better to read examples of great poetry than to read about it in critics’ prose.
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Still, Matthew Arnold acknowledges that it might be necessary to define what the highest poetic qualities consist of. Arnold’s answer is simple: they consist of “matter and substance,” which is to say subject matter and “style and manner.” In a great poem, both of these attributes will be of the highest worth and power. But Arnold rejects the idea that it is possible to define poetic greatness any further: to do so would only confuse matters, not clear them up.
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However, there is one thing that Matthew Arnold notes should be added to the definition of the proper subject matter for great poetry: Aristotle’s concept of high seriousness. It is this “high seriousness,” along with high truthfulness, that gives the greatest poetry its special quality, Arnold explains. Likewise, the style of great poetry can be further defined as consisting of diction (word choice) and movement (rhythm) of the highest rank. These qualities—high seriousness, high truthfulness, diction, and movement—work in unison to make a poem great. Where high seriousness is lacking, diction will also be deficient; where movement is inferior, high truthfulness will also be absent.
Matthew Arnold admits that these definitions might seem rather abstract to readers but insists that readers can verify the ideas by simply reading great poetry. In fact, Arnold adds, reading great poetry will allow readers to encounter the qualities of poetic greatness in a far more profound way than his explanations can. Still, it is worth the effort of looking at a few examples to confirm that, indeed, such definitions allow readers to arrive at the real estimate of a poem. For that reason, Arnold explains, he will run briefly through the course of English poetry as he sees it.
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Matthew Arnold begins by looking at two early varieties of French poetry, the langue d’oil and the langue d’oc, from which sprang troubadour poetry and romance poetry, respectively. Arnold focuses on the latter, showing that, while much of this early poetry has been forgotten, it had a direct influence on the poetry of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer, Arnold notes, is a true poet: “a genuine source of joy and strength” who will be read more in the future than he is now, the difficulty of his archaic language notwithstanding. Chaucer’s great virtue, in Arnold’s view, is his “large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life.” Unlike the romance poets that preceded him, Chaucer writes about the world from “a central, a truly human point of view.” This gives his work the high truthfulness that Arnold is looking for in great works.
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Nor is that all: Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry also possesses a “divine liquidness of diction” and “divine fluidity of movement” that make him the founder of the tradition of English poetry. Matthew Arnold notes that Chaucer’s diction and movement (which is to say, his use of meter) are irresistible and gives two examples of his verse to illustrate its high qualities. It is possible, he notes, that part of Chaucer’s great liquidness is his ability to play with language in a way that is considered off limits to modern poets—by adding an “e” to the end of a word, for instance—but it would be a fallacy to say that this is entirely the cause. The cause of Chaucer’s greatness, Arnold declares, is his talent.
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This might all be true, but Geoffrey Chaucer does not belong to the highest echelon, Matthew Arnold argues. What is missing in Chaucer, he writes, can be suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great poet of the Christian world, Dante Alighieri. Dante’s name is associated with the kind of “high and excellent seriousness” that, according to Arnold, is out of reach for Chaucer. Arnold reproduces a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy to show that, indeed, Dante writes about lofty, grandiose subjects, such as God and fate. Chaucer—unlike Dante, William Shakespeare, and Homer— does not exhibit this high seriousness, for all the freedom and good humor with which he writes about life. Unfortunately for Chaucer, it is this high seriousness that “gives to our spirits what they can rest upon,” so he does not belong in the highest rank of poets.
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After reiterating that Chaucer is nevertheless a poet of great stylistic and linguistic value, Matthew Arnold moves on to a discussion of the poetry of John Dryden. Arnold skips over the Elizabethan era, arguing that everyone agrees that Shakespeare and Milton are poets of the first rank. The case of Dryden is more difficult. For their part, Dryden and his contemporaries had no doubt that their poetry was as good as or even better than that of their predecessors, a judgment that had some currency even until Arnold’s day. But, Arnold asks, is this historic estimate of Dryden’s work in line with the real estimate? Arnold acknowledges that it takes a brave critic to deal with Dryden so categorically, since Dryden is clearly a powerful and highly respected poet. Nevertheless, Arnold argues that he must find the real estimate of a poet’s value.
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The first thing Matthew Arnold makes clear about John Dryden is that he is a great writer of prose. Arnold compares Dryden’s prose to that of two other writers, Chapman and John Milton, and argues that Dryden’s is superior to them all. One of the reasons for the greatness of Dryden’s prose is the circumstances in which he wrote: after the age of Puritanism, English culture needed to free itself from religious preoccupations, a task which required strong prose writing, with its “regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.” One downside of a strong prose, Arnold points out, is that it tends to undermine religious and spiritual feeling. More importantly, it cuts against the demands of poetry.
Thus, Matthew Arnold regards John Dryden, along with Alexander Pope, as the “splendid high priest of our age of prose and reason.” But he does not regard him as a poet of the first rank. Dryden’s poetry lacks the poetic criticism of life, the high seriousness, and the “powerful poetic application” that readers should expect from great poets. Arnold produces three lines from Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer as evidence that Dryden cannot match these classic poets. Dryden and Pope are respectable poets, but, belonging to the age of reason, they are first-rate prose writers, not poets.
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Matthew Arnold takes a brief detour to discuss the poetry of Thomas Gray, an English poet of the 18th century. While Gray does not meet the highest standard that Arnold looks for in the greatest poets, he is a classic poet because he caught the spirit of the Greek poets and put it into his own works. This spirit is not a permanent feature of Gray’s verse, but it is present, which is enough to make him a classic, even if he is “the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry.”
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At this point Matthew Arnold turns to Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the 18th century. Arnold points out that the personal estimate applies particularly to Burns, since he wrote rather recently (at the end of the 18th century) and embodied Scottish culture, which leads some to value him for patriotic reasons. But, as with John Dryden, it is important to arrive at the real estimate of Burns’s poetry. Arnold begins his discussion of Burns by dismissing his English-language poetry, which he describes as “not the real Burns,” and insisting that readers study his Scotch poems if they want to get a real sense of Burns’s value. Arnold acknowledges that Burns’s Scottish subject matter will endear him to some readers, but that it is important to consider him independent of his world. “Let us look at him closely, he can bear it,” Arnold writes.
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Next, Matthew Arnold analyzes one of Robert Burns’s poems about drinking alcohol, arguing that, while many admire poems such as this one, it lacks the sincerity required for truly great poetry. Arnold asserts that there is something insincere in Burns’s poem and that, since the poet is not speaking to us in his true voice, there is something “poetically unsound” about the poem. Similarly, Arnold examines three other poems by Burns—all of them, he says, admired by readers—before declaring that these examples show Burns falling short of the most important of Arnold’s standards, that of high seriousness. Pointing to Dante once more, Arnold claims that Burns’s verse is not fully sincere but is more akin to preaching. Arnold has some words of consolation for Burns’s admirers: if they admire Burns less now, their admiration for Dante and his peers will be greater.
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There are times, to be sure, when Robert Burns meets the threshold of high seriousness, but these, Matthew Arnold argues, are the exception that proves the rule. The accurate estimate of Burns is that he has “truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters.” The real Burns is not the poet who talks about the most grandiose concerns, but the poet who writes about whistling. Comparing him to Geoffrey Chaucer, Arnold notes that both poets have a certain freedom and largeness, but Burns is fiercer and more energetic, while Chaucer is more profound and more charming.
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Matthew Arnold uses this real estimate of Robert Burns to address the case of more contemporary English poets, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. Arnold refers to this as “burning ground,” since a reader’s personal estimate is so likely to interfere with arriving at a real estimate of these poets. Arnold explains that he does not have space to discuss these poets at length, but that the same method he applied to Burns—comparing Burns’s verse to that of classic poets such as Dante—should allow readers to arrive at a real estimate. Arnold points out once more that an anthology is little more than an opportunity for readers to practice properly estimating great poetry.
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Matthew Arnold closes his essay by returning to the purpose he outlined at its beginning and reflecting on the democratization of English culture in his day. Arnold reiterates that readers cannot get the full benefit of reading poetry—a benefit he describes loftily as the ultimate source of consolation in life—unless they are able to feel and enjoy the things that make classic poetry classic. The world is becoming a more common place, Arnold complains; while there are more readers than ever, the masses seem not to be interested in the work of the great poets. However, after sounding this note of pessimism, Arnold is defiant: whatever happens, poetry “never will lose supremacy,” since humanity, whether it knows it or not, must rely on it for “self-preservation.”
