Matthew Arnold (Literary Studies) (Bibliography‪)‬

Through the years there has been a continuous interest in Arnold and the roles he played in British cultural history, literally the part he played in developing the key term "culture" and the widespread influence of his critical ideas, while interest in individual poems (apart from his concept of poetry and its central importance in social, aesthetic, and moral contexts) has been less constant. In last year's essay, however, I took note of several new readings of individual poems by Arnold, and this year I will begin my discussion by pointing out articles from 2006 and 2007 that focus on individual poems, though the emphasis is on a "poetry of ideas." In "Shaping the Self: Critical Perspective and Community in Sohrab and Rustum" (VP 45, no. 1: 17-28), E. Frances Frame discusses the narrative poem that Arnold intended to be the centerpiece of his new book of poems in 1853. In this tragic story based on an eleventh-century Persian epic, a celebrated warrior learns that the adversary he has mortally wounded in individual combat is his own son. Frame argues that in Sohrab and Rustum "Arnold first confronts not only the limits of language but also the major obstacle to human community with which he will battle throughout his prose: the individual's resistance to recognizing the boundaries of his own knowledge and power." In Frame's reading, Sohrab, the son, from the beginning, possesses critical perspective, while Rustum, the father, "shuts himself off to anything outside himself" until he realizes that he has killed his own son at the end. Rustum is like the "Philistines" who resist the message of the critic in Arnold's prose. Frame suggests that Sohrab is "Arnold's first depiction of the critic," and if that is the case the critic may expect to pay a high price indeed for his openness to ideas. Of course, in the final analysis one would not want to submit the poem to a reductive reading in which the meaning is confined to a preview of Arnold's critical ideas, but surely Frame is right in suggesting that Arnold identified with Sohrab's stance of reaching out to his father and, in a larger sense, opening his sense of selfhood to others in contrast to a violent, warrior culture that promotes prideful self-absorption like that of Rustum.