ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), poet and critic. Extracts (a) and (b) were written soon after reading Milnes's Life. Arnold's point at the end of (a) seems to be that young writers should study simplicity, then if they fail as poets they can still cope with life; whereas writers (such as Keats) who cultivate richness and abundance are overwhelmed both as poets and men. Arnold's fuller and more famous estimate of Keats, written thirty-five years later as an introduction to the Keats selection in A. W. Ward's English Poets (1880), develops a similar argument to that in the 1853 preface (d): Keats's gift of expression ranks with Shakespeare's, but in the ‘faculty of moral interpretation’ and the ‘architectonics’ of poetry he was immature. He had ‘flint and iron in him’ as well as sensuousness, and ‘the elements of high character’, but these qualities were still unripe when he died.
