The most famous poems of Matthew Arnold are elegies, though not conventional, personal elegies mourning the death of a friend. The subject of "The Scholar-Gypsy" is a semi-legendary figure about whom the poet reads in a seventeenth-century book. The poem mourns not only the poor scholar himself, but his aspiration to live a contemplative life away from a society that has only become more frenzied and tumultuous in the last two centuries. In "Dover Beach," it is religious faith itself that has died, leaving only "its melancholy, long withdrawing roar."

In "Dover Beach" particularly, Arnold's tone is despairing to the point of nihilism. He can suggest no remedy for the loss of religious faith except for personal fidelity in the face of the darkness. In his poems, he is an elegist or obituarist rather than a social critic. It is in his prose works, particularly "Culture and Anarchy," that Arnold's social criticism becomes positive and constructive rather than hand-wringing. It is early in the preface to "Culture and Anarchy" that he gives his famous prescription:

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits

Much of the rest of the essay is given over to an explanation of what Arnold means by culture and how he believes Victorian England can be ennobled and purified by a strong dose of classical civilization, specifically that of fifth-century Athens. It is here, by setting forth a powerful cultural and academic agenda which is still influential in liberal arts education today, that Arnold establishes himself as an effective social critic of the Victorian era, as well as subsequent ages.