The title of Ian Hamilton's study of Matthew Arnold's poetry is taken from a poem by W. H. Auden that probes the reason why Arnold “thrust his (poetic) gift in prison till it died.” Auden's diagnosis is that Arnold's allegiance to his dead father's memory caused him to turn away from the life of the contemplative poet and become a man of action, who would use his pen to write polemical prose advocating a gospel of culture.

[In A Gift Imprisoned] Hamilton thus follows Auden in seeking the reasons for the collapse of Arnold's career as a poet in the son's relationship with his father, which he sees as an ambivalent love-hate situation. Although Hamilton eschews the term “Oedipal,” his study advances a loosely psychoanalytical thesis. Using Arnold's poems and letters which are quoted with insight and discrimination, he argues the point that Arnold was driven by the example of his dead father's “purposeful life” to commit what amounts to artistic suicide.

As Hamilton's subtitle indicates, he sees his book as a “Poetic Life” rather than the full-scale biography which he had initially intended to write. The ambition to do so, he writes, sprang from “a number of intriguing puzzles” such as who was the mysterious Marguerite in the group of love poems entitled “Switzerland”? Was she a dream-girl born form too much reading of romantic French novels, or was she a real person whom Arnold met in 1848 and then dropped? There has been much conjecture about this vexing question but Hamilton is firm in his opinion that Marguerite was a real girl, but is less sure about Arnold's reasons for hesitation about the affair—was it his “pusillanimity, his weakness of will, his inability to make a commitment to Marguerite?” Hamilton offers no solution as to the identity of the girl who inspired Arnold's impassioned sequence of poems, grouped under the collective title of “Switzerland.” All we know of her is what Arnold tells us in these poems and in letters to his friend A. E. Clough to whom he admits he was in love with a blue-eyed girl he had met at a hotel in Thun, Switzerland. The best argument for the reality of Marguerite lies in the confused passions revealed in the lyrics he wrote to her which seem to ring true with authentic emotions. Unfortunately, the only piece of real evidence, the register of the Hotel Bellevue where Arnold met Marguerite while she was staying there, was destroyed years ago.

The mystery of Marguerite, however, is not the only ambiguous chapter in Arnold's life that Hamilton investigates. Much of his focus is on the early years of Arnold's life, especially his puzzling behavior in those decades of his young adulthood when he was writing some of the most melancholy and original poems of the Victorian period and posing as a Byronic dandy.

As he sees it, the most complex biographical fact is that Matthew Arnold was the oldest son of the most famous headmaster in England, Doctor Thomas Arnold of Rugby College. Arnold's father was convinced that his mission was to make his boys into Christian soldiers, and the school during his tenure as headmaster turned out graduates who were marked by piety, a strong sense of duty, and that quality which was the quintessence of the high Victorian age: earnestness. Rugby College produced many high-ranking clergymen and bishops, a cadre of colonial officials, numerous judges, and many Rugby Old Boys went on to become headmasters of dozen of England's best public schools where they continued the pedagogical practices of Dr. Arnold. In fact, the mission and curricula of English public schools during the Victorian period were dictated by the model of Arnold's Rugby School. Furthermore, the legend of Arnold's rule at Rugby was perpetuated by worshipful former students like Thomas Hughes whose novel Tom Brown's Schooldays portrayed the headmaster as a noble man who inspired his boys to strive to do good and be righteous.

The atmosphere at Rugby was a combination of sports, learning, and religious zealotry, and it was an atmosphere from which Arnold had no escape because when school vacations came, he got no break from the ever-present totalitarian influence of his headmaster father. As Hamilton says, the “place crackled with moral fervor” as he endeavored to bring the children in his family as well as the boys in the school “to see a duty in every act of their lives.” The presence of Dr. Arnold has been described as magnetic, awesome, irresistible, and yet, as Hamilton states, there was more to it than simple intimidation. He somehow made his students want not to let him down. In his Sunday sermons to the schoolboys, he urged them not to waste their time in folly and to see that life was no fool's paradise but a struggle where one must take sides. According to Tom Brown's testimony, he had the capacity to make his sermons sound as if they were meant especially for you. In our idiom, he could “lay a heavy guilt trip” on his audience.

Young Matthew Arnold did not become a student at his father's school until he was fourteen years old, but he had been under his father's tutoring almost from infancy. Dr. Arnold decided his children's learning schedules as soon as they could walk. By the time he reached five, Matthew's program of studies included Latin, French, arithmetic problems, history, geography and scripture passages to memorize every day. At six he was set to the study of Greek, German, and Italian upon which he was examined closely by his father who supervised his program.

Early on, however, the Arnolds were troubled by their oldest son's attitude. He was loving and loyal but not entirely serious, a fact which disturbed Dr. Arnold, who frowned on Matthew's taste for fine clothes, jokes, and “smart” people. His mother also lamented his vanity and love of ease. She was especially distressed by his fascination with firearms. Matthew's poor eyesight made him an inept marksman, however, and he eventually gave up shooting for fishing which would remain a passion for the rest of his life. Another disturbing habit he developed about this same time was his disappearing trick; he would be unaccounted for hours on end, causing the family much concern about his whereabouts. No one seems to have understood his motive for going missing, but his behavior points to an increasing tendency to go against the grain with his parents. Apparently on some of these solitary excursions he engaged in “poetising,” as his mother called it.

Arnold's earliest poetry dates from 1836 when he was fourteen years old. His first poem, “Lines Written on the Seashore of Eaglehurst,” was in the manner of Thomas Gray and shows that Arnold's preoccupation with water imagery started early on. Another influence was Lord Byron whose example of rebellious behavior had as great an impact on Arnold as his themes of ill-fated lovers and the ruins of empire. Arnold's juvenile poem, “Constantinople” (1839), features dying lovers and laments the invasion of the doomed city by the Turks, revealing that Arnold's tendency to write on the theme of loss and to lament the “vanished days of old” was established from the onset. His first published poem, “Alaric in Rome,” was composed about 1840, and although the language is stiff and trite, Arnold's subject, which was taken from the classical past, shows Arnold's early penchant for taking classical antiquity as the proper topic for poetry.

As Arnold's early poems hinted at the path he would take in his later more mature writing, he also began to show the “dandy” side of his personality that especially distressed his parents, who lamented his decided “lack of a sense of duty.” The impression he made on one of his Rugby classmates, Henry Crabb Robinson, was that Matthew was a young man with “the tinge of a fop that does him no harm. …” His father's reservations about his eldest son's attitude were revealed in his surprise at Matthew's winning an Oxford scholarship; he wondered if this did not signify a lowering of the university's standards rather than a success on his son's part.

Oxford was a welcome respite from the censoring eye of his father, and Arnold enjoyed a release from the intensely moralistic atmosphere of Rugby. But even at the university he could not entirely escape the presence of Dr. Arnold who was appointed to the post of Professor of Modern History in 1842, which meant that his father would be in residence at Oxford for periods of time each year while delivering the eight lectures expected from him.

Nevertheless, Matthew Arnold continued to exhibit the mode of behavior that he had displayed at Rugby. He seemed to be striving even more to try to set up a distinction between himself and his stern parent by being facetious in manner and desultory in his habits. In appearance he was verging toward the extreme of foppishness with kid gloves, monocle, French style sideburns and fancy waistcoats. The report issued by his Balliol college head for his freshman year indicates that Arnold was “indolent,” “not uniformly regular” and “not sufficiently attentive to the rules of the college” (49). The only commendation he received on his report card was for his skill in writing English essays. Over all he was ranked as average, what would have once been a “C” student in an American university prior to grade inflation and the assumption that all undergraduates, like the children of Lake Wobegon, are “above average.”

Arnold seemed totally indifferent to great intellectual and theological debates stirred up by the Tractarians at Oxford. Newman's teachings made no impression on him at all, though he did admit later that he was charmed by Newman's spiritual charisma and his “perfect handling of words,” which appealed to him more than the moral content of his sermons. The one scholastic activity that appealed to Arnold was extra-curricular—the debates that took place among an undergraduate debating society called “The Decade,” so named because there were initially only ten members. In this group were several ex-Rugby boys—Stanley, Clough, and Arnold's younger brother Tom, as well as Benjamin Jowett who would later become the most famous master of Balliol in the Victorian period. In the opinion of one former member of The Decade, John Duke Coleridge, “the society did a good deal for the mental education of those who belonged to it, especially those of us who had been taught at public schools to learn grammar by heart, to write verses in Greek and Latin by rote but where our minds were allowed to lie fallow, unclouded by thought …” (p. 50).

Although Arnold seemed to project an air of intellectual laziness and affected a kind of languor, his mind was stimulated by an introduction to the writings of Carlyle, Emerson, Goethe, and George Sand. None of these authors was on the syllabus at Oxford, however, and Arnold was doing little reading that would prepare him for his final examinations.

When he should have been studying for “schools,” as the exit exams were called, Arnold instead roamed the Oxford countryside with his friends, went skiffing on the river, or swam in the streams around the university. Once while skinny-dipping in the “Strippling Thames,” he was rebuked by a clergyman for his lack of modesty, to whom he replied, taking a line from William Blake, “Sir, is it possible that you see anything in the human form divine that is indelicate?” Among Arnold's other undergraduate foibles was his practice of leaping the high railed college walls while wearing his academic robes risking being impaled on the spikes. One wonders what Arnold's motives were for playing the fool. Was he merely rebelling, as so many preachers' kids do, or was it a more profound filial reaction of the sort described in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh or Edmund Gosse's Father and Son? Arnold, however, never openly broke with his father, and his behavior was in part a strategy to give himself a little space. The son's levity and light-heartedness were his way of mocking his father's high-seriousness, but underneath his façade of foppishness and persiflage there was, as his closest friends suspected, an aspect of role-playing, as though Arnold were living in a disguise, a suspicion that would be validated with the publication of Arnold's first poems. As Hamilton astutely surmises, Matthew's affectations “served as a means of keeping Dr. Arnold's extreme earnestness at bay, but they also protected him from his own earnestness” (p. 57).

Influenced by Carlyle's notion that poets were heroic types and that poetry was “the highest form of the Godlike in man's being” and also convinced that modern times were spiritually bankrupt, Arnold attempted in some of his earliest poems to deal in a serious way with issues that he had heretofore seemed to be indifferent to. He began to believe that there might be “another way for him to go,” having eliminated the chance for a teaching career after taking a disappointing second-class degree. So in 1844 Arnold began to consider seriously the idea that he might have a vocation as a poet, and that poetry might have value and as much application to general life as teaching or preaching.

Arnold's career as a poet really starts then at the end of the 1840's and carries through the next decade. It was in this short span of time that Arnold wrote some of his most interesting and important poems. Hamilton discusses the poetry in the context of the political turmoil and social fragmentation that were occurring all over Europe at this time. Citing Arnold's correspondence to Clough, he points out that Arnold described writing poetry as a “tearing apart of oneself” and quotes his famous confession concerning his poetry: “My poems are fragments because I am fragments.” By extension society was also fragmented due to these “damned times when everything is against one … the absences of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties” (p. 118).

Hamilton's point is that Arnold's poems are not so much private complaints but a reflection of the Zeitgeist, which is exactly why his poems continue to engage us. For all of Arnold's stiffness and academic tone (that so annoyed T. S. Eliot, of all people), his greatest poems—“Dover Beach,” “The Buried Life,” “The Scholar Gipsy,” “Stanzas From the Grand Chartreuse” and “Thyrsis”—speak about the central problems of modern life: how do we achieve a sense of connection with others or find a faith in a world that tends to alienate us from everything, even our own sense of who we really are? It was this candid anguish and bafflement that most commended Arnold's poetry to Eliot, who says, “With all his fastidiousness and superciliousness and officiality, Arnold is more intimate with us than Browning, more intimate than Tennyson ever is, except at moments in In Memoriam … His poetry [Arnold's] is too honest to employ any but his genuine feelings of unrest, loneliness, and dissatisfaction” (The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism, 1933).

It was Arnold's difficulty in finding any solution to the question that he raised concerning the underlying alienation that caused him to “thrust his gift in prison till it died,” as W. H. Auden put it, leaving him with a “jailer's voice and face.” Arnold knew all too well that the age was out of joint, but it was not enough merely to say so. The world needed the “missionary efforts of a mighty helper” (p. 110) and, as his sister saw it, “Matt's poetry holds out no help for the deep questions which are stirring in every heart … poetry which does not do this will not help the human race.”

Hamilton thinks that the incarceration of his muse began in 1851 around the time of Arnold's renunciation of Marguerite and his marriage to Frances Lucy Wrightman, a Tory judge's daughter, which obliged him to find a better paying job to support his new wife. The position Arnold found was that of government inspector of schools, a career that would condemn him to grinding and mundane duties for the next thirty-five years. At about this point, Arnold was writing Empedocles on Etna, a long, dramatic poem about a heroic, stoic philosopher who commits suicide by jumping into a volcano rather than compromise with a world too crass for his finer nature to abide. Having written what was his magnum opus to that date, Arnold seemed to have reservations. He had only 500 copies printed with just his initial “A” on the title page. His own evaluation of this poem was that its “strain of thought generally was much too doleful and monotonous.” In fact, he was so unhappy with Empedocles that he withdrew the volume from circulation only a few months after it was published. Then in 1853 he wrote his famous Preface to his collected poems, explaining why he was renouncing his major poem and substituting for it a new long poem, Sohrab and Rustum.

As Arnold makes clear in the Preface, he omitted Empedocles because it depicted “a continuous state of mental distress which was unrelieved by incident or hope … where everything is to be endured, nothing to be done.” The poem simply did not measure up to his new conception that poetry should be cheerful, calm, and instructive. It was as if Arnold had decided “to demote his own talent”; as Hamilton puts it, the “pessimistic poet gave way to the prescriptive sage” (p. 157). It was increasingly dawning on Arnold that poetry might actually supply the “religious wants” of the world; in fact, it had already been supplied by the Greek poets, and what was needed now was not new poetry but an understanding of what was already available. The requirement now was for “a sagacious guiding hand, a helpful voice, a teacher who could keep alive some vital commerce with the ancients” (158).

Arnold thought that with Sohrab and Rustum he might have supplied the classical objectivity his earlier poetry lacked and avoided the great sin of the romantics who wrote allegories of their private states of mind. Ironically, Sohrab and Rustum, a poem about a father and son who meet in a battle that results in the son's death, creates an allegory that Arnold was not aware of, for it was at this point in his career that Arnold the poet was annihilated by the spirit of his father the teacher. Arnold's valediction to his poetic life would be made in one of his last great poems, “The Scholar Gipsy,” where, in urging the fugitive scholar to avoid contact with us, he is in fact forsaking his own poetic life.

From Hamilton's perspective there is no mystery as to why Arnold dried up as a poet. He did not use up his creative powers like Wordsworth; he simply turned them off as it was increasingly borne in on him by his family and his own sense of compunction that Dr. Arnold would not have approved of his versification of the Weltschmerz. Thus, he surrendered to the call to duty and took up a different line of writing that allowed him to address the social causes his father would have championed. If it required that he give up his role as a poet to be worthy of his father's legacy, so be it; it was his duty as a loyal son. Thus, he put behind him his vocation as a poet and turned to writing the prose that would make him a Victorian prophet, a trade-off that Hamilton sees as an act of creative renunciation. Having described how Arnold buried himself as a poet by 1869, which was the year the music died, his book ends here although Arnold would live on until 1888 and write some more verse and many volumes of prose.

Although Arnold's poetic output was only a fraction of his total work, his poetry, more than that of any of his contemporaries, exposes the restlessness, the lost faith, the weariness with life and the nostalgia for lost times when things were supposedly better. Arnold himself realized that his poetry combines the melancholy of Tennyson with the intellectual and cultural displacement of Browning and, as he wrote his mother in 1869, “My poems represent on the whole the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day. …” He was right; it is precisely because Arnold's poems mirror the spiritual and intellectual crises of his age that they have fared so well with modern readers who can relate to the misapprehensiveness about life that his poetry anticipates.

As Arnold became more and more convinced that the models of classicism should be taken by contemporary poets as an antidote for “the strange disease of modern life” which he so morbidly diagnoses in “The Scholar Gipsy,” he also came to believe that art, especially poetry, was the only possible replacement for religion as a form of wisdom and moral direction. Since his own poetry was so deficient in what he called the “high seriousness” and “grand style” of the classics, Arnold converted himself into an apostle of the higher culture of antiquity and forsook his own poetic gifts.

Most would agree that Arnold allowed his poetic talent to diminish and finally die by 1869. Hamilton makes no claim his thesis is original nor does his biographical information add anything new to what we already know about Arnold from earlier full-scale biographies by Nicholas Murray (1997) and Park Honan (1981). Yet, A Poetic Life is a very good book in terms of what Hamilton sets out to do, which is to show how Arnold's gift for writing lyric poetry was driven underground by the ambivalent love-hate relationship he had with his father. The parental influence from beyond the grave finally had a crippling effect on Arnold's creativity as a poet; Dr. Arnold's spirit, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, would not let his son rest until he had carried out his commission.

Finally, we must commend Hamilton for his brief but clearly argued commentaries on Arnold's poems, which more than compensate for the book's routine rehearsal of biographical facts. His critical views are expressed in a lucid prose that is a welcome respite from the language so many literary critics and theorists speak today. Happily, Hamilton avoids the sort of deliberate obfuscation and obligatory political correctness that presently pass for literary criticism.