Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold himself attended Rugby and then Oxford University (Balliol College). He wrote most of his best-known poetry before the age of forty, after which he turned to literary and cultural criticism. His poem "Dover Beach", with its depiction of a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded, is sometimes held up as an early, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility. In a famous preface to a selection of the poems of William Wordsworth, Arnold identified himself, a little ironically, as a "Wordsworthian." The influence of Wordsworth, both in ideas and in diction, is unmistakable in Arnold's best poetry. While his poetry endures, his criticism seems dated now. Nevertheless, it was influential among writers of the early 20th century.

His niece (daughter of his younger brother Thomas), Mary Augusta Arnold, was a novelist under her married name of Mrs Humphry Ward.