Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"

The Daily Poem · Feb 6, 2024 · 12m

Today’s poem is the one you had to read in high school without really understanding it. (Or was that just me?)

Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his poetry criticism. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more balanced formulation in his prose. This unity was obscured for most earlier readers by the usual evaluations of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as…