On The Sublime Of Matthew Arnold’s Poetry

Matthew Arnold, one of the most outstanding poets and critics in the Victorian Age,has exerted tremendous influence upon cultural criticism in late19thcentury and20thcentury. His arguments for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aestheticsand morals represent in particular the mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. WhileArnold has never gained the popularity like his great contemporaries, his verses, lessvoluminous and narrow in poetic concerns, reflect the collapse of the faith in his age. Thestudy on Arnold’s poetry in China might have started with Wu Mi who regards Arnold as apessimist. Literature studies show that most Chinese scholars tend to follow Wu’s opinionon Arnold. But this paper attempts a different approach by focusing upon the sublime inMatthew Arnold’s poetry, suggesting that Matthew Arnold’s poetic concern with thesublime is one of his solutions to the moral crisis of the Victorian age.The paper starts with a survey of the definitions of the sublime and a brief explanationof Arnold’s thoughts on the sublime. Then, the thematic sublime of Arnold’s poetry isapproached from four aspects: love, isolation, faith and death, all contributing to theexpression of his concept of the sublime. The paper finds that love in his lines is not onlythe earthly bliss between men and women, but an abstract and sublimate spirit whichpurports to heal inner wounds. The love in his poetry carries with it a traumatic sense,which may arouse a feeling of the sublime. Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold’s poetryoften wrestles with problems of psychological isolation which exhibits his gravemeditation on the moral condition of his time and his anxiety over the tragic destiny ofhuman being. Thus, the isolation in Arnold’s poetry presents us a tragic but heroic feelingof the sublime. The loss of religious faith in Arnold’s poetry is in fact a longing for the newfaith. Placed in a world of declining religious faith and a world in want of new faith,Arnold suffers from tremendous misery. The painful process of the exploring new faith enhances the nobility of human soul and tests the dignity of human being, and thereforearouses a sense of the sublime. Arnold’s speculation on death is in a sense an admirationfor immortality and the beauty of life, which naturally brings about the feeling of thesublime.The stylistic sublimity of Arnold’s poetry is found in his employment of sublimephonology and sublime imagery. Except his sonnets and some lyrics poems, most ofArnold’s poetry is not decorated in musicality, which explains the high truth andseriousness of his poetic subjects. For him, expression should serve the subjects of poetryand too much decoration in rhythm and rhyme would spoil the sense of sublime. Thus, theplain expression of Arnold’s poetry is the proper embodiment of his idea of the sublime.Moreover, Arnold prefers to employ sublime images of landscapes like sea, island, cave,valley to support the presentation of the themes and to produce the effects of visualsublimity.The sublime in Matthew Arnold’s poetry is closely related with his knowledge onclassical literature. Arnold’s poetry is abundant with Hellenism. Arnold believes that thesublime of poetry could purify personal souls and social atmosphere, but his attempt ofreplacing the religion with poetry as a solution for the social salvation proves to be tooidealistic to be realized.