Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon

his poetry and his poetry criticism. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but
many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or
more balanced formulation in his prose. This unity was obscured for most earlier readers by the usual
evaluations of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as melancholy or elegiac, and of his prose as
urbane, didactic, and often satirically witty in its self-imposed task of enlightening the social
consciousness of England.

When Arnold’s poetry is considered, a different meaning must be applied to the term modern than that
applied to the ideas of the critic, reformer, and prophet who dedicated most of his life to broadening
the intellectual horizons of his countrymen—of, indeed, the whole English-speaking world. In many of
his poems can be seen the psychological and emotional conflicts, the uncertainty of purpose, above all
the feeling of disunity within oneself or of the individual’s estrangement from society which is today
called alienation and is thought of as a modern phenomenon. As Kenneth Allott said in 1954: “If a poet
can ever teach us to understand what we feel, and how to live with our feelings, then Arnold is a
contemporary.”

The recurring themes of man’s lonely state and of a search for an inner self; the rejection in “The
Scholar-Gipsy” of “this strange disease of modern life,/With its sick hurry, its divided aims”;

"Dover Beach" is the most celebrated poem by Matthew Arnold, a writer and educator of the Victorian
era. The poem expresses a crisis of faith, with the speaker acknowledging the diminished standing of
Christianity, which the speaker sees as being unable to withstand the rising tide of scientific discovery.
New research and intellectual inquiry cast doubt on humankind's central and special role in the
universe. The speaker in the poem senses this change almost subconsciously, seeing and hearing it in
the sea that the speaker is looking out upon. In its expression of alienation, doubt, and melancholy, the
poem is often interpreted as a remarkably forward-thinking precursor to 20th century crises of faith—
like Existentialism and Absurdism. In essence, the poem is an inquiry into what it means to be alive.

“The sea is calm tonight,” observes the somber speaker of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867),
listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles” at the shore, “The eternal note of sadness” over the waters.
In Arnold’s mid-19th-century Britain, another metaphorical sea, “The Sea of Faith,” was ebbing
irretrievably: “But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; once seemingly “So various,
so beautiful, so new,” Arnold’s world had “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor
peace, nor help for pain.” More than a century and a half after its publication, “Dover Beach” remains a
durable expression of Victorian poetics: its intricate patterning and stagy theatrics, its nostalgia for
simpler times, and its uncertainties about an increasingly mechanized modernity. Arnold once wrote
that “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” an enterprise of the utmost artistic and moral stakes. Over
the course of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901), Arnold and his contemporary British poets
criticized contemporary life amid its epochal changes: the radical ideas of evolution and materialism,
shifting understandings of gender and class, and an economic and industrial explosion that helped make
the British Empire the largest in history.

When we remember Victorian literature, we might think immediately of the three-volume novels of the
Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens, the extravagant comedies of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan,
and the unforgettable fictional characters—Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Lewis Carroll’s little
Alice, Bram Stoker’s Dracula—who populate world culture to this day. But in 19th-century Britain,
poetry was as prestigious as ever: thanks to advances in literacy and publishing, poetry had never been
read by a wider audience (from schoolchildren to Queen Victoria herself) or been more profitable
commercially. Books by the most popular poets routinely sold out through several editions.

Victorian poetry’s most distinctive qualities may stem, paradoxically, from its proximity to other genres
and forms: theater, fiction, music, and art, all of them poetry’s competitors in a fully stocked cultural
marketplace. Asking in the 1833 essay “What Is Poetry?” the philosopher John Stuart Mill responded
with terms pilfered from drama: “Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude. …
All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy.” In the era’s most heralded poetic innovation, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson and Robert Browning hybridized drama, fiction, and lyric into the dramatic monologue form: a
poet impersonates a fictional or historical character and addresses a silent audience without any
narrative framing or guidance.