- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Arnold introduces his concept of the “real estimate,” his term for the genuine value of a poem, after describing the fallacies of the “historic” and “personal” estimates, which refer to readers’ tendency to overrate historically important and personally significant works, respectively. Arnold suggests that the “real estimate” is timeless and beyond individual preference. This is Arnold’s principal goal for readers of “The Study of Poetry”: namely, to be able to distinguish between excellent and inferior works.
In this quotation, Arnold also explicitly ties the ability to “enjoy [a] work as deeply as ever we can” with the full benefits he…