Matthew Arnold Quotes

Poetry is at bottoma criticism of life.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden,Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’.