Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

There is a particular quality of voice in Arnold's poetry that has kept readers returning to it for over a century: a elegiac clarity, a measured grief, the sense of a mind wrestling honestly with doubt. This comprehensive collection gathers the complete poetic output of Victorian England's most thoughtful versifier, from the early lyrics through the great narrative poems and elegies to the later works. Here is "Dover Beach," with its famous image of the "sea of faith" withdrawing like the shore at ebb tide, its quiet devastation laying bare the spiritual anxiety of an age. Here too "The Scholar-Gypsy," that haunting pursuit of a vision beyond the world's compromises, and "Thyrsis," one of the finest elegies in English, mourning a friend with grave musicality. Throughout these pages Arnold explores what he called the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of certainty, rendering the struggle between faith and reason in lines of precise, aching beauty. For readers who have felt the particular Modern affliction that Arnold first gave voice to the hunger for meaning in a world that can no longer provide easy answers, this collection remains essential.