ABSTRACT
In his Preface to his Poems (1853) Matthew Arnold makes a bold attempt to bring poetry back to a classical allegiance. Arnold's Preface of 1853 attempted to restore design to poetry when the discursive and the grotesque, The Excursion and Browning's tradition, were in danger of obscuring it. Arnold's references to religion and belief show how unreal is the classicism he advocated. Arnold had a glimpse of that temptation and it grows as the nineteenth century proceeds. The poet has, of course, often welcomed such a retreat but for different motives. The contemporary critics of romanticism have assumed that this verse is a direct inheritance from the early nineteenth century, the so-called romantic revival. The poetry of the later nineteenth century is not confined to the pre-Raphaelites, or to the romantic tradition. If other ways in poetry have for a time obscured the beauty of his verses, or of the tradition to which they belonged, the neglect cannot remain permanent.
