Matthew Arnold

Notes from J. Hopkins for quick reference:

"disinterest" - - To be disinterested is to participate in a common cultural tradition or a common body politic, and it is to evince a genuine, generous appreciation of what is truly excellent within these forms of common experience. To be generous in this way is to embody one's "best self", and it is from the perspective of this best self that the disinterested critic passes judgment on all specific social and intellectual issues.

First major English critic to invest poetry with sacral status..Ref. William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats

proponent of "free play of the mind upon all subjects"

Like mid-Victorians, including George Eliot, and John Stuart Mill, he believed that the historical progression of culture was tending toward the realisation of human "perfection".

The necessity of system. actively engaged in the pursuit of "intellectual deliverance" from spiritual distress.

"On the Modern Element in Literature" in 1857 culminates with "Culture and Anarchy" in 1868..a decade in which..Literature and Dogma (1873) and God and the Bible (1875)

In the phase of early essays towards "Culture and Anarchy" he seeks to strike a balance between the "Hebraic" moral consciousness and the "Hellenic" critical intelligence. but dominance of Hellenism.

In 1860s, ..leaning toward Romantics, esp William Wordsworth.