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  • Matthew Arnold
  • Clinton Machann (bio)

2012 was a productive year in Arnold studies. James Walter Caufield's monograph Overcoming Matthew Arnold (Ashgate) was already discussed in last year's essay, and now I want to emphasize substantive articles that feature some new readings of Arnold's poetry, including individual poems that are frequently studied by scholars: "Dover Beach," Empedocles on Etna, "Thyrsis," and "The Scholar-Gipsy."

I will begin with Margaret H. Freeman's "The Aesthetics of Human Experience: Minding, Metaphor, and Icon in Poetic Expression" (Poetics Today 32, no. 4 [2011]: 717-752). This article (which appeared in 2012) has wide-ranging implications for the study of poetry that should be of interest to all readers of Victorian Poetry, but it focuses on her reading of Arnold's "Dover Beach." Freeman argues that cognitive scientists should incorporate aesthetic insights associated with intuition and imagination into their study of the arts. She cites the work of the philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), along with that of twentieth-century scholars Susanne K. Langer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but she wants to link this line of thought to developments in the cognitive sciences, and I think her arguments are consistent with recent work in the field of evolutionary psychology which associates the mental predispositions shaped by evolution with the arts. In her discussion of "Dover Beach," she deals with Arnold's use of metaphor in terms of "the interrelationship of physical sensory impressions and responses in the brain," and I am pleased to quote her reference to Arnold's poem as "one of the best-known poems in the English language" (p. 735). Freeman claims that her reading of the poem differs from those of earlier literary critics and cognitive psychologists and linguists because it focuses on the reader's experience of "felt life," and she emphasizes "domain crossing" as the reader imagines the sights and sounds portrayed in the poem. The poetic images are explored in depth as we approach the final stanza, in which the speaker "rejects the idea that endows the external world with human feeling" (p. 745). Freeman's main point is that a study of poetic expression in terms of human imagination should be central to scientists' study of the human mind and of course this is solidly in the Arnoldian tradition.

In "'Poor Faun! Poor Faun!': A Nietzschean reading of Empedocles on Etna" (VP 50, no. 2. [2012]: 147-166), Roslyn Jolly focuses on the violent execution of the faun Marsyas as well as Empedocles' fatal leap into the crater of the volcano, as she offers new insights into this widely discussed but problematic [End Page 337] poem which in effect signals the end of Arnold's poetic career. She refers to Nietzsche's analysis of a struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as she explores Arnold's engagement with similar conflicts. Inspired by the songs of his youthful friend Callicles, Empedocles does momentarily recover a feeling of joy in union with nature, but this feeling is illusory. In her analysis Jolly emphasizes Arnold's insight into civilization's estrangement from nature, which he repressed in his critical writings: "In effect, the censoring of Arnold the poet by Arnold the critic was manifested as a silencing of Empedocles by Callicles" (p. 31) and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) "might be sub-titled 'The Triumph of Apollo'" (p. 32). But prior to that, the "nature-culture" conflict can be seen in other writings, including the poems "The Scholar Gypsy" (1853) and "Thyrsis" (1866), in which the remedy for the "disease of modern life" is sought in nature rather than culture, and in the essay "Maurice de Guérin" (1863), in which Arnold explores a sense of nature as sacred. Of course the split between Arnold's "two literary careers" has been discussed by various scholars. Philosophical pessimism in Arnold's poetry is stressed in Alan Grob's influential study A Longing Like Despair (2002), in which Arnold is compared to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Grob argues that it is only Arnold the poet, not Arnold the cultural critic, who can be meaningfully labeled a philosophical pessimist; however, he suggests that...

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