Matthew Arnold - Characteristics of Good Poetry

Hello Readers !

Literature has plethora of authors and critics. To be precise, in English literature, one can analyse that how vast and deep the ocean is. Any work of literature cannot be said as fairly good of fairly bad literature. Because readers may have their own perspective to read it. One can't judge the depth of an ocean by just watching the surface. Here comes the important role of criticism. Criticism provides many lenses to see through various dimensions of a single work of literature. With New Criticism, one can elucidate the work of art with four important lenses like, Mimetic, Objective, Pragmatic and Expressive criticism. But before this new criticism arrived, there was a major critic who brought forward a new way of looking at poetry; none other than Matthew Arnold. Let's feed our minds with some information about the critic and then narrow down to the definition of poetry, along with touchstone method.

Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888)

Matthew Arnold was a Victorian cultural critic and poet belonging to 19th century. He has written famous critical essays like The Study of Poetry (1880), and Function of Criticism at Present Time (1865). He has supported poetry more than any other dialects of study like science, theology, religion and philosophy. Matthew Arnold has given something significant that he stands as a link between the Romantic critic Coleridge and the New Critics or 20th century critics like T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Harold Bloom.

Let's see on which parameters Matthew Arnold explains his views on good poetry.

* Disinterestedness or detachment

According to Arnold, a critic has to be free from all personal or historical prejudices. This was considered as the first great principle of criticism. Critic should not have any fallacies in mind while giving criticism. Fallacy means mistaken beliefs. According to the book Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams there are two fallacies which may relate to the present idea of disinterestedness or detachment, intentional fallacy and affective fallacy. Intention of the author is nullified in the criticism.

* The Touchstone Method

Touchstone is a method of doing criticism taking one good work of literature and taking some part of it and comparing to all other works of the same genre, and concluding to the best one. For example if we take a poem or a sonnet on love, and keeping some lines of the poem in one hand, we try to see many other poems of the same genre of love, and try to compare them with the present poem which we are holding.

The same method one can apply in death poems also. If we take John Donne’s Death Be Not Proud, as a good poem, we can see how the lines of this poem are good or bad in comparison of other death poems. This is called touchstone method. Arnold puts forward his arguments on Chaucer, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, striking that they are not good poets. Especially Dryden and Pope are not at all poets but good masters of prose writing in meter.

* What is Poetry ?

Arnold states that poetry is criticism of life. The very work of creativity is criticism of life. It is judged by laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of matter, felicity and the perfection of diction and manner. It should be true and there should be high seriousness in creative work, be it comedy or any other genre. While doing criticism of Canterbury Tales, Arnold records that Chaucer is lacking high seriousness. Arnold's classic poets are Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and Sophocles, Goethe and Wordsworth.

Though analyzing a poem with critical context is quite lengthy task but still if one would try, here is a poem by Wordsworth which has the qualities of Arnold's definitions.

My Heart Leaps Up - Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

The poem has both poetic truth and poetic beauty. The poet has tried to draw a landscape with poetic beauty which we can see in first two lines. And the concept of growing old, and death is also relating with the truth of life. It is well woven with poetic truth. The poem seems to fit in some of the characteristics of poetry propounded by Matthew Arnold.

works cited:
(1)https://dilipbarad.blogspot.com/2014/11/mathew-arnold-study-of-poetry.html
(2) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69374/the-study-of-poetry
Image source: Wikipedia
Poem source: https://poets.org/poem/my-heart-leaps

Thank You !