![]() ![]() My early dismissal of his work reflects how often we reject things that we might otherwise like, based solely on accidents of timing. Though not without his blind spots and inconsistencies, he has an astonishing breadth of vision and depth of insight. ![]() Lionel Trilling, the great public intellectual of the mid-20th century, was one of Arnold’s most ardent defenders, but he died in 1975, the year I entered graduate school.īut I now see Arnold differently. In a period of political tumult, Arnold seemed a fusty personage, out of joint with the time. Phrases like “sweetness and light” and “the best that has been thought and said,” central to the Arnoldian lexicon, felt saccharine and elitist when I read them in the mid-1970s. I liked “Dover Beach,” his one poem still widely anthologized, but found the rest of his poetry (and all of his criticism) verbose and tedious. ![]() I first read Arnold in college and, again, in larger chunks, in graduate school. This is certainly the case with the writings of the 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold. ![]() Most had little effect on me at the time, but I am drawn back to them for mysterious reasons, sensing that I will respond differently now. Lately I’ve been revisiting books that I vaguely remember from college and graduate school. ![]()
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