Matthew Arnold (Guide to the Year's Work) (Victorian Poetry) ("the Scholar-Gipsy") (Critical Essay‪)‬

There were several substantial new readings of individual poems by Arnold in 2005, and I will begin with two articles on "The Scholar-Gipsy," an important new poem in Arnold's well-known 1853 edition, which included a famous preface and notably excluded the poem Empedocles on Etna. Arnold intended Sohrab and Rustum, a blank-verse narrative in the Homeric tradition, to be the centerpiece of his new book. He was less satisfied with "The Scholar-Gipsy" because it did not "animate" and "enoble" readers but instead provided only a "pleasing melancholy," as he wrote his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Nevertheless, the poem had a special significance for him, because it was associated with Clough and their Oxford years; both Arnold and Clough were familiar with the source of the scholar-gypsy legend, Joseph Glanvill's seventeenth-century book The Vanity of Dogmatizing, and the two young poets had walked together in the Cumner countryside near Oxford where the story is set. (When Arnold later wrote "Thyrsis," his elegy on Clough, he made it a companion-piece to "The Scholar-Gipsy.") Although he was not finally satisfied with the poem, Arnold was attempting to create a new version of the solitary questers who wander through his early poetry. For Arnold the myth of the scholar-gypsy stood for unity, stability, and creativity in a world of change and frustration, and this poem anticipates his notion of the "best" self, as distinct from the "ordinary" self, which he developed in his critical prose. At the same time, in spite of Arnold's earlier critical remarks about Keatsian lyricism, which he had contrasted with the classical grand style, "The Scholar-Gipsy" shows evidence of Keats's influence. According to John P. Farrell in "'The Scholar-Gipsy' and the Continuous Life of Victorian Poetry" (VP 43: 277-296), the poem does much more; he reads it as Arnold's "celebration of the continuous life of poetry." Although he acknowledges previous studies that emphasize Arnold's personal struggles and his intense awareness of his contemporary historical situation, with all its uncertainties and discontinuities, Farrell argues persuasively for an interpretation of the poem that is more positive about the history-and the future--of poetry. He accepts Harold Bloom's description of Arnold as a "derivative" poet but places it in a positive context as he shows how in "The Scholar-Gipsy" Arnold celebrates the continuity of the poetic imagination. Farrell's reading of the concluding two stanzas, much discussed by previous critics, is especially perceptive, and though he pays attention to the historical context of Arnold's work--incorporating, for example, a helpful discussion of Friedrich Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poets--he associates Arnold's treatment of poetry here with that of the modern poet Mark Strand in his long poem The Continuous Life (1990). This new assessment of Arnold's poetic vocation should be of interest to everyone who cares about the continuing relevance of his poetry.