Abstract

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.

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