A Matter of Ellipsis: Love, Strife, And the Pressure for Specialty in Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna"‪.‬

I In what has amounted to a definitive article on Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna," Walter Houghton claims that "No one can read [Empedocles'] existing Fragments, or what is known of his life and times, and imagine that Arnold was trying to recreate the man or his though or his environment" (312). And although Louis Bonnerot, Paull F. Baum and, more recently, R. Peter Burnham have made quiet claims that the actual writings of Empedocles provided Arnold with minor inspirational points, most defer to Houghton's 1958 judgement and generally maintain that "Empedocles on Etna ... has no need for the ancient philosopher's ideas-any Stoic's might have served as well" (Feshbach 271). (1) In short, most critics have been reluctant to apply the life and works of Empedocles--the man, poet and scientist--to the lengthy dramatic poem bearing his name. That the reluctance is attributable to nobody's knowing enough about Empedocles, as one critic has suggested (Hill 15), is not likely, since at least two others (Feshback, Neff) have been brave enough to claim the presence of Empedoclean cosmology in "Dover Beach." Far more likely it is that in the longer poem the real Empedocles, though present in a number of significant ways, is hard to locate for good reasons, one or two of which might also be at least partly responsible for Arnold's pulling the poem from the 1853 edition of his poetry and for his writing his anxiously defensive and enigmatic 1853 Preface. (2)