Matthew Arnold — a remark

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“Literature is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”

Presenting literature as an ethically and aesthetically serious response to life · Preface to Poems (1853)

About Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

24 December 1822–15 April 1888

Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham, Middlesex, a village beside the Thames, and died suddenly on 15 April 1888 at Liverpool. He became one of the defining English voices of the Victorian age: a poet of haunting melancholy, a critic who sought standards of excellence amid cultural confusion, an…

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Poems by Matthew Arnold

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