Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1969. Alan Roper studies the degree to which Arnold achieved a unity of human significance and literal landscape. If landscape poetry is to rise above the level of what Roper calls country contentments in verse, the poet cannot think and describe alternately; his thinking and describing must be a part of one another. That Matthew Arnold was aware of the difficulty in achieving the necessary unity becomes clear in his own criticism, which Roper examines along with a large and representative number of Arnold's poems. Considering the latter roughly in the order they were publishedexcept for a fuller analysis of Empedocles on Etna, The Scholar-Gipsy, and ThyrsisRoper follows important changes in Arnold's view of the function and nature of poetry as it emerged in the poems themselves. Basic to the author's critical method is a distinction between geographical sites and poetic landscapes. Focusing on the ways that Arnold and, to a lesser extent, the Augustan and Roman
Table of ContentsPreface
Method of Citation
Introduction
Chapter 1. Arnold's Poetics
Chapter 2. Varieties of Landscape Poetry
Chapter 3. Landscape in 1849
Chapter 4. Landscape in 1852
Chapter 5. Mount Etna
Chapter 6. The Cumnor Hills
Chapter 7. Various Landscapes
Appendix: Arnold's Volumes of 1849, 1852, 1853, and 1867
Index
