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Arnold’s Arrhythmia
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 48, Number 4, Autumn 2008
- pp. 755-767
- 10.1353/sel.0.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay considers Matthew Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” (1852) and the piece that displaced it, “Preface to Poems” (1853), as halves of a single fractured document. It argues that in his turn from poetry to critical prose, Arnold never abandoned the problem of verse, but rather developed a figurative and formal prosaics designed to transmit poetic rhythms intermittently. Accordingly, it discerns in both texts a hybrid species of emergent free verse that Arnoldian criticism practiced, but remained unable to name.