Matthew Arnold Quotes

Poetry is at bottoma criticism of life.

His expression may often be called bald…but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

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.

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