Bridging the gap between romanticism and modernism: Transitional poetics of Matthew Arnold
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Department of English
Abstract
Matthew Arnold belongs to the group of the reflective, thoughtful and intellectual poets of the Victorian age. He was a brilliant critic and man of letters who exposed the total dissatisfaction towards his contemporary lived world. In so doing his literary works and typically the poetry fuses the two great literary movements: Romantic and Modern. His use of symbolic landscapes like the beautiful resort of Oxford in “The Scholar Gipsy” and the sea images in “Dover Beach” resembles the romantic legacy of nature as the best place to escape the bitter disillusion of the aspirations expected. Whereas the style of doubting on the faith of human beings and the continuous affection to seek a perfect center or a ‘culture’ and nostalgia of it opens the way to interpret him in the modern frame. He is the bridge between romantic and modern ethos. What the present researcher is trying to do is to show that while blending romantic and modernist frame and describing the lived reality, he is proliferating his own ideology that appears irresponsible and dominating towards the ordinary classes for he valorizes the high culture as the sole property of aristocratic people. Moreover, the researcher attempts to critique his tendency to valorize the ‘high seriousness’ and ‘high culture’ practiced by the aristocratic people in his poetry and prose alike even if he professes poetry as the ‘criticism of life’ in his prose work “The Study of Poetry”.