Shaping the Self: Critical Perspective and Community in Sohrab and Rustum (Critical Essay‪)‬

Most critics agree that Sohrab and Rustum marks a turn in Arnold's work from the exploration of the isolated sells emotional and existential plight, which characterizes such poems as "The Buried Life" and Empedocles on Etna, to what Arnold considered a more objective type of poetry. The poem is thus important because it is vital to understanding this major shift in Arnold's poetics. Further, Daniel Kline has persuasively demonstrated that Sohrab and Rustum is essential for comprehending Arnold's struggle with language. (2) I would claim that the poem is crucial for another substantial reason. 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 Sohrab and Rustum Arnold dramatizes this resistance to critical perspective, the role others play in helping the individual reach such perspective, and the cost of the struggle to attain it. Understanding how Arnold is working through these ideas in Sohrab and Rustum is particularly important because these concepts come to dominate much of his later writing on literature, politics, and religion. The resistance to critical perspective that Arnold dramatizes in Sohrab and Rustum he thematizes in his prose. (3) In fact, his entire critical project is an attempt to overcome what Arnold perceives as his audience's resistance to other people and ideas. Arnold's prose also thematizes the importance of others in attaining critical perspective and the necessity of this perspective for maintaining community, both ideas that he first dramatizes in Sohrab and Rustum. (4) Finally, I suggest that Hegel, with whom Arnold was in fact familiar if his reading lists are any indicator, can help to elucidate Arnold's dramatization of these themes in Sohrab and Rustum. (5) In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Arnold describes a critical perspective that is open to other voices: