In Wild Oats, Jacob Epstein's novel of 1970s' US campus life, the hero, Billy Williams, is induced to explain the meaning of “Dover Beach” to an ignorant fellow-student. Effortfully, each cadence reduced to a demotic approximation, some kind of decoding is achieved, by which time initial bewilderment yields up to grudging approval of Arnold's sentiments: “Yeah, yeah. That makes some sense. The world's fucked up, but the dude's in there with some fox, so he don't give a shit.” A century and a half on, it's tempting to wonder what Arnold would make of this, whether the stern critic would mark it down as another Regrettable Modern Tendency or whether the dandy poet and the sympathetic school inspector would have joined forces to proclaim an enduring relevance.

Whatever the answer, Arnold would certainly have noted the irony of this future judgement, for “relevance” was not something that the young poet of the 1840s was generally credited with. Early critics thought him suspiciously old-fashioned and out of touch, an imitator rather than an innovator, and even his friend Campbell Shairp wished he would “give up all that old Greek form”. Arnold himself compounded the bad impression of Attic drapery by rebuking Wordsworth for using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, and setting himself up as what Ian Hamilton rightly calls a “high purposed architect of verse”.

The oppositions of Arnold's poetic temperament—temperament generally, if it comes to that—are convincingly outlined in A Gift Imprisoned. Hamilton contrasts the wistfulness of “The Scholar Gypsy”, and its glimpses of a solitary, imagined life, with the grave-faced classicism of later poems; and points out that the man who spent years wrestling with an aborted Lucretian epic on the grounds that this was the kind of serious endeavour that poets ought to embark on, was also responsible for some of the great public pronouncements of inner Victorian disquiet. “Dover Beach”, in particular, is a pivot on which a great deal of 19th-century thought turns, using the Greek stage to conjure the vision of “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight …”

It would be surprising if some of these tensions weren't deeply rooted in Arnold's own personality. Hamilton's theme, in effect, is the struggle between the wistful nomad of “The Scholar Gypsy” and the son of Arnold of Rugby, which produced a series of elegiac private musings and a whole row of poems to the ever mysterious “Marguerite”, before marriage and the job as a schools inspector began to chain the poet to the mid-Victorian mainstream (in fact he went on publishing poetry until the late 1860s). Certainly Arnold's poetic pronouncements of the 1850s look like a deliberate step backwards from his early position, notably the essay in which he decides that while “the world tends to become more comfortable for the mass and more uncomfortable for those with any natural gift or distinction”, the world might do worse than “dismiss the high pretensions, and settle down on what it can see and handle and appreciate.”

Yet for all Hamilton's exemplary scholarship, one wonders if the oppositions—classical and romantic, poet and homme d'affairs—are quite so clear-cut. After all, Arnold maintained a low opinion of literature as a profession, and clearly conceived himself as a public operator in the paternal tradition at a relatively early stage. There is something in the idea of the poet lost to schools inspecting, and the need to earn a living; but, as John Gross once put it, even as literature one wouldn't forgo his reports on elementary schools for the sake of another “Thyrsis”.

Close inspection often reveals Victorian writers to be rather less “committed” to the idea of literature than modern orthodoxies like to allow: Thackeray, for example, spent most of his post-Vanity Fair career angling for a public appointment that would absolve him having to work. For all that, though, it is not enough to say that Arnold would have gone on writing romantic poetry had romantic poetry paid, and Hamilton illuminates not only the puzzled and dutiful figure of Arnold himself, but the wider anxieties to which he gave a voice.