Arnold asserts that literature, and especially poetry, is "Criticism of Life". In poetry, this criticism of life should conform to the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as are exhibited in the simplest poets, are what constitutes a criticism of life.
Poetry, says Arnold, interprets life in two ways that: "Poetry is interpretative by having natural magic in it, and ethical profundity". And to attain this the poet must aim at high and excellent seriousness in all that he writes.This demand has 2 essential qualities. The primary is the selection of fantastic actions. The poet should select those that most powerfully attractiveness to the good primary human feelings which subsist permanently in the race. The second essential is what Arnold calls the Grand Vogue - the perfection of kind, selection of words, drawing its force directly from the pregnancy of matter which it conveys.
This, then, is Arnold's conception of the character and mission of true poetry. And by his general principles - the" Touchstone Technique" - introduced scientific objectivity to crucial analysis by providing comparison and analysis as the 2 primary tools for judging individual poets. So, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Shelley fall wanting the best, as a result of they lack "high seriousness". Even Shakespeare thinks too much of expression and too very little of conception. Arnold's ideal poets are Homer and Sophocles in the traditional world, Dante and Milton, and among moderns, Goethe and Wordsworth. Arnold puts Wordsworth in the front rank not for his poetry but for his "criticism of life". It is curious that Byron is placed above Shelley. Arnold's inordinate love of classicism made him blind to the beauty of lyricism, and we have a tendency to cannot accept Arnold's view that Shelley's poetry is a smaller amount satisfactory than his prose writings.
Arnold's criticism of life is often marred by his naive moralizing, by his inadequate perception of the relation between art and morality, and by his uncritical admiration of what he regarded as the golden sanity of the ancient Greeks. For all his championing of disinterestedness, Arnold was unable to practise disinterestedness in all his essays. In his essay on Shelley significantly, he displayed a lamentable lack of disinterestedness. Shelley's ethical views were too much for the Victorian Arnold. In his essay on Keats too Arnold did not be disinterested. The sentimental letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were an excessive amount of for him. But Arnold's insistence on the standards and his concern over the relation between poetry and life build him one among the nice fashionable critics.
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Ray Baker has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Literary Classics, you can also check out his latest website about:
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