'The burden of ourselves': Arnold as a Post-Romantic Poet

Abstract

This essay returns to the question of the response to the major English Romantic Poets, especially Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, made by Matthew Arnold in his poetry. It focuses on the doubleness and dividedness of this reponse, and it argues that Arnold wavers in an unstable but poetically productive way between seeking to establish his distance from Romantic poetry and conceding its hold over his imagination. The essay considers a range of poems by Arnold, including 'The Buried Life', "Empedocles on Etna," 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', 'The Scholar-Gipsy', 'Memorial Verses', 'A Summer Night', 'Dover Beach', and 'To Marguerite--Continued'.