Matthew Arnold

24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888

An English poet and critic who spent thirty-five years as an inspector of schools. Poems such as “Dover Beach” and “The Scholar-Gipsy” made his name, and from the 1860s he turned to criticism: Culture and Anarchy (1869) set culture, “the best which has been thought and said in the world”, against the complacency of Victorian England. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867.

works

1869

Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism

"Culture and Anarchy" is Arnold's most famous piece of writing on culture which established his High Victorian cultural agenda and remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s.

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