Matthew Arnold

Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.

• Belief: The literature shapes culture.

Culture and anarchy
He defended culture against scientific materialism. culture means qualities of independent thinking and intellectual open-mindness.

1. He advocated that culture perfection can prevent corruption and help to curb the worship of material wealth. "The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweetness and light."
2. "Sweetness and light"---- suggests reasonableness of temper and intellectual insight.
3. The society should be "permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive."
4. His concept of culture includes the political, the social and the religious aspects of life.
5. Culture should be the most effective way to cure the ills of a sick society.
6. The middle class in England is narrow minded and corrupted by materialism, therefore the world sold be dominated by a group of people who not qualified to play a leading role in the development of society. He tried to wake up those people, and to make them ware of the importance of improving themselves culturally.

Essay in Criticism(1865, 1888)

1. He expressed his understanding of social function of an artist in the Victorian age.
2. Literary criticism means a great deal more than simple book-reviewing.
3. Good criticism is " a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas."
4. Critics helps people to "see the object as in it really is".
5. Critism extends beyound literature; criticism has social function to foster the sublime spirit of age.
6. The poem should be serious and truthfu.

Dover Beach

1. Religious forward: Tendency to relay 
2. Religion fulfills literature to make the society processing in order properly.
3. Religion as socially cohesive element literature (poetry) as religion's surrogate social conservative.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

1. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of amn's nature, just this disinterested love of a fee play of the mind on all subjects for its own sake, ----it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. 
2. Real criticism, is essentically the exercise of this very quality. It obeys and instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politic, and everything of the kind...