Arnold's Poetic Landscapes

Arnold's Poetic Landscapes Synopsis

Originally published in 1969. Alan Roper studies the degree to which Arnold achieved a unity of human significance and literal landscape. If landscape poetry is to rise above the level of what Roper calls "e;country contentments in verse,"e; the poet cannot think and describe alternately; his thinking and describing must be a part of one another.

That Matthew Arnold was aware of the difficulty in achieving the necessary unity becomes clear in his own criticism, which Roper examines along with a large and representative number of Arnold's poems. Considering the latter roughly in the order they were published-except for a fuller analysis of Empedocles on Etna, "e;The Scholar-Gipsy,"e; and "e;Thyrsis"e;-Roper follows important changes in Arnold's view of the function and nature of poetry as it emerged in the poems themselves.

Basic to the author's critical method is a distinction between geographical sites and poetic landscapes. Focusing on the ways that Arnold and, to a lesser extent, the Augustan and Romantic poets before him untied thought and description, Roper adds a critical dimension to Arnold scholarship. Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.