Thinking Activity-Matthew Arnold

Among the major Victorian writers sharing in a revival of interest and respect in the second half of the twentieth century, Matthew Arnold is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his prose. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more balanced formulation in his prose. This unity was obscured for most earlier readers by the usual evaluations of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as melancholy or elegiac, and of his prose as urbane, didactic, and often satirically witty in its self-imposed task of enlightening the social consciousness of England.

• Idea of Matthew Arnold which I found in the resting and relevant in this time:

The Idea I most like from is the  principal of disinterestedness and detachment. Disinterestedness on the part of the critic implies freedom for all prejudice, personal or historical. I like this idea most because when one critic has prejudice then that criticism is not good. Because when he criticized any thing with any kind of prejudice then his work lost its originality. We consider criticism as work of art because critic himself observe something different then other author and criticize that nothing. So, when he criticized anything he must be free from personal and historical prejudice.

• One idea of Matthew Arnold which I found out of date and irrelevant in this time.

Touch stone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools for judging individual poets. In a simple language he wants to say that for judging any new poet's best work and by taking best work of old poet we have to compare it with new poet's work and analyze the new work and if its have the same quality which old work has then we can consider that new work as good or best work. There is no need to comparison. Everyone has their own qualities we can not except to all to have same qualities and we cannot consider one quality as best and other inferior. We must accept work with it's originality comparing with other work losses feeling of that work. And Arnold himself say that, "The poet must choose those action which most powerfully appeals to great primary Human feeling which subsist importance to feeling rather that the words or comparing with other poet or there work.