Context: In this poem Arnold laments the deaths of the three greatest poets of the early nineteenth century. Byron, who died in 1824, taught little but enabled men to feel "the strife . . . Of passion with eternal law." Goethe, however, was "Europe's sagest head," and his death in 1832 deprived men of the vision of suffering that might lead to happiness. But Wordsworth, unlike the others, was a healer. Byron and Goethe showed what human life was like and that misery was inescapable; they can be replaced. But after Wordsworth's death in 1850, there can be no other poet to soothe the misery of "doubts, disputes, distractions, fears"; this ability was Wordsworth's greatness–he had neither force nor wisdom, only the ability to make men forget their misery and be young again.