Publisher Description
Poetry is a fascinating use of language. With almost a million words at its command it is not surprising that the British Isles have produced some of the most beautiful, moving and descriptive verse through the centuries. In this series we look at individual poets who have shaped and influenced their craft and cement their place in our heritage.
Matthew Arnold is rightly placed amongst the greats of Victorian Poetry. The son of the founder of Rugby School, he grew up to be a poet via a career as a school inspector. He has been characterized as a sage writer, a writer who instructs through his writing. Read here are some of his best poems, including, "The Last Word," "The Austerity of Poetry," "Bacchanalia, or, The New Age," "The Buried Life," "A Caution to Poets," and many more.
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About Matthew Arnold
Matthew
Arnold (1822-1888) was a British poet and cultural critic. Though
he is remembered today largely for his elegantly argued critical essays, he
began his career as a poet and believed that poetry should be the “criticism of
life.” His work as a critic—literary and social—began later in his career with
his professorship of poetry at Oxford. By the late 1860s, he had turned almost
entirely to prose.
Arnold was educated at Rugby School, where his father was
headmaster, and later at Oxford. Upon completing his studies, he took up a job teaching
at Rugby School and traveled around the continent, eventually taking the
position of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, which he held for thirty-five
years. He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy, what is in some regards his most central work.
About the Narrators
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.