Arnold, Matthew | Alan Grob (essay date 1996)
Alan Grob (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: “Arnold's ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’: The Use and Abuse of History,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 149-74.
[In the following essay, Grob contends that Arnold's later poetry and his prose represent a fundamental break from a “predominantly metaphysical mode … of explanation” of the human condition to a philosophy of cyclical history that was closely aligned with prevailing Victorian intellectual tendencies.]
After the publication in 1849 of The Strayed Reveller, And Other Poems, Arnold's poetry conceptually underwent something of a midcourse correction, a tentatively taken turn from predominantly metaphysical modes of explanation for our unhappy human predicament to what clearly seems a more overtly historicist analysis of our situation, a turn, it should be added, that brought Arnold as poet and later as prose writer more closely in line with the prevailing...
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