Poems

Matthew Arnold stood somewhat apart from his Victorian contemporaries, and this generous selection of his poetry reveals why. Here is a poet who believed poetry should be "a criticism of life" but delivered that criticism not with polemic fire but with a melancholy clarity that still resonates. The collection opens with "Dover Beach," perhaps the most haunting Victorian poem in English, its famous image of the "Sea of Faith" retreating from the world remains one of literature's most resonant evocations of modern doubt. Also included are the full texts of his ambitious narrative poems: "Empedocles on Etna," with its meditation on artistic isolation; "Sohrab and Rustum," a collisions of civilizations rendered in Homeric blank verse; and "Tristram and Iseult," with its fatal love and autumnal grief. Yet what surprises in this volume are the three late elegies for household pets, tender and strange, which reveal Arnold's capacity for private grief beneath his public seriousness. These are poems for readers who want Victorian poetry at its most intellectually serious and emotionally honest, verse that confronts the loss of religious certainty with beauty rather than bitterness.