A gift imprisoned

by Hamilton, Ian

"Matthew Arnold had two lives. In his later years, he was Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic. In his youth, he was an impassioned lyric poet, deeply at odds with his "damned times". Arnold's poetic life - the life that gave us "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Empedocles on Etna" - was effectively over by the age of forty, when he began to devote all his energies to "purposeful" prose composition." "For about twenty years, however, he made efforts to resist his destiny, and this book is the story of that losing battle. As a...

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