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“... a powerful effect, in England as well as Germany: it is not easy to imagine the work of either Arnold or Pater without Goethe’s influence. The classicising period aroused in Germany an enthusiasm for Greek culture that led to intensive study of the Ancient world. The University of Berlin, organised by Humboldt with the aid of Wolf, became the prototype ...”

“... seminal voice in American philosophic criticism. It is with such living ideas that Hartman, like Arnold, is concerned, and he succeeds in tracing its pulse down to our own time, and in suggesting stimulating solutions to contemporary critical dilemmas. The lively, fresh account of ‘the reception’ presented by Mrs Ashton should serve to introduce ...”

“... and hence any criterion for deciding what is, in more than a personal sense, of relative interest. Matthew Arnold is mentioned in her introduction as one of the pioneers of the study of comparative literature, but it is Arnold’s concern with the humane uses of literature, and his impatience, when surveying the ...”

“... hearing about the natural aristocracy that democracy needs. We are hearing about how to find what Matthew Arnold called one’s ‘best self’. The question is not just what, now, sanctifies marriage. It is also what, now, in Depression and War, sanctifies America. Men and women as men and women, and as citizens too, are accordingly divorced from an ...”

“... and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because his translatorese verse-prose is hard to read at long stretches. This new and ...”

“... and of moral improvement, as well as by the partisans of ‘culture’ who rallied behind Matthew Arnold. Her account of the debate about the function of the Royal Academy reveals the early skirmishes in the unending combat between market forces and artistic high-mindedness. But, having opened, the view quickly closes again. The wider perspective ...”

“... inseparable from the flaws, for its strengths and limitations arise from the same source. In 1853, Matthew Arnold pondered the reassuring significance of Classical authority in the preface to the first edition of his Poems: ‘I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practise it, a ...”

“... bankrolled a break-out from Englishness. No longer were knees required to bend before a deadening Matthew Arnold-T. S. Eliot confection of tradition and canon. A different though not unrelated heritage also goaded some of the British to examine the ‘English’ bias distorting their own outlook. Not for the first time, revolutionary ideas imported from ...”

“... muddy tones, they peered out from behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these ...”

“... never seemed to arrive anywhere. ‘You are too content to fluctuate,’ his friend and rival Matthew Arnold once rebuked him, ‘to be ever learning, never coming to the knowledge of the truth.’ As one of Clough’s most sympathetic 19th-century readers, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, observed, he was a man who would neither ‘heartily accept ...”

“... and wrote well about the essay. They certainly gave Orwell greater attention than they paid to Matthew Arnold. This thorough socio-critical examination blinks deliberately any question of literary values, and is not designed to change received ideas about Orwell. Those hostile to his attitudes and infuriated by his occasional rash statements will find ...”

“... to Gramsci is rather strange here, since the writer whom Rushdie is indisputably echoing is Matthew Arnold. Although ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, Arnold’s great poem on the ‘two worlds’ trope, seems profoundly antipathetic to Rushdie’s temper, it has some relevance to the dilemma in which the ...”

“... and each links the most intense inwardness to the most unabashedly cosmic of questions. From Matthew Arnold’s portentous idiom of sweetness and light to George Steiner’s reverent talk of artefacts as real presences, art is a domain of displaced transcendence. It is the one remaining intimation of immortality for those who mourn the spiritual ...”

“... like dirty postcards in a drawer’. Then I remembered the line by which the same poet skewered Matthew Arnold: ‘And thrust his gift in prison till it died’. Sparrow was a man who appeared to have had every girt handed him by the gods: unshakeable homosexuality – no pram in the hall to make war on his early promise; brutal, but stunning ...”

“... that it was the foredoomed attempt to find or recover an innocent language that destroyed Matthew Arnold as a poet. However that may be, the impossible enterprise did not end with Arnold, and it has not ended yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward ...”