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A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold
. with dustjacket, bright clean copy, Professional booksellers since 1981
- GenresBiography
241 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1998
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About the author
Ian Hamilton
69 books20 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2025
I suppose I should not have expected to find a happy life story about the man who gave us this stanza:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But I did not expect to find a life so full of self-doubt and struggle. I mean, at least he knew he had written something for the ages, right? No. Bad reviews, sick children, a job he disliked, a sense of being a disappointment in comparison to his father, a wish that he had the money to travel more with his wife—that is what Matthew Arnold chiefly experienced, if this biography is accurate. More and more I think that art does nothing for the artist, and to hope that it will (that in creating something you will fix something inside yourself and fix it for good) is a tragic delusion.
So am I giving the book low marks for not making Matthew’s life more sparkling? This is not impossible. But I think that I wanted the biography to be more riveting. I wanted more immersion, more dramatization, and more identification with Matt (as many people called him) so that I could feel more deeply his sense of frustration and sadness. I often felt at a great distance from the events and people described, and I felt that the ending, especially, was rushed, as if Hamilton couldn’t wait to be finished. The book is too short and too dispassionate for my taste.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But I did not expect to find a life so full of self-doubt and struggle. I mean, at least he knew he had written something for the ages, right? No. Bad reviews, sick children, a job he disliked, a sense of being a disappointment in comparison to his father, a wish that he had the money to travel more with his wife—that is what Matthew Arnold chiefly experienced, if this biography is accurate. More and more I think that art does nothing for the artist, and to hope that it will (that in creating something you will fix something inside yourself and fix it for good) is a tragic delusion.
So am I giving the book low marks for not making Matthew’s life more sparkling? This is not impossible. But I think that I wanted the biography to be more riveting. I wanted more immersion, more dramatization, and more identification with Matt (as many people called him) so that I could feel more deeply his sense of frustration and sadness. I often felt at a great distance from the events and people described, and I felt that the ending, especially, was rushed, as if Hamilton couldn’t wait to be finished. The book is too short and too dispassionate for my taste.
August 18, 2019
I’ve never been much of a fan of Matthew Arnold’s poetry beyond ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, ‘Thyrsis’, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, and ‘Dover Beach’. That last is certainly one of my desert island poems. All the Marguerite and Merman stuff, however, leaves me cold, and I can’t make head nor tail of ‘Empedocles on Etna’. The fact is that I find Arnold often abstract rather than concrete (and I respond much more strongly to the concrete), or syntactically convoluted and overcareful, overworked, pedantic perhaps, lacking a killer phrase in favour of an artfully constructed rhyme – by which time the sense and feeling have been lost for me.
I think Hamilton’s take on Arnold has encouraged me that it is not unusual or unacceptable to think of Arnold in this way: it seems to me he is not writing an apologia for Arnold, and does not try to rehabilitate poems that do not deserve rehabilitation. Because I felt he was on my side, I was keen to see what his take on this Victorian figure was.
Well, there’s a certain amount of biographical stuff which I found interesting, often drawing on correspondence, especially with his sister Jane who, though not discouraging, could be relied on to be honest in her opinions of his verse. Much of the biographical detail concerns, of course, Arnold’s father, the legend that is Arnold of Rugby and ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. A hard act to follow, and one whose influence was felt by all his children especially when it came to duty and to education: Matthew became a Chief Inspector of Schools in England, his brother Tom became an Inspector of Schools in Tasmania and another brother, William, was Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab.
But Matthew, something of a dandiacal character, felt himself drawn to write poetry and wasn’t actually, judged by what are still considered his best poems, without a gift for both lyric and epic. What he does seem to have been without, however, was a conscience that clear enough to allow him to do it, and he had a similarly debilitating uncertainty about what was an appropriate poetry to be writing.
With this, I am peculiarly sympathetic. Having enjoyed writing poetry, I have stopped as I find myself afflicted by a sense that there’s so much already out there and so much of it, although not unworthy, inept or unenjoyable, that lacks socially significant substance, the great corpus of contemporary literature doesn’t need another person contributing to it. It’s because I’m without a clear idea of what poetry should be about, or what distinguishes a Poet from a poet, that I don’t write it any more. The nearest I can get to the idea of a modern Poet – and my knowledge, frankly, of Good Modern Poetry is not extensive, so my opinion is very likely inaccurate – is Tony Harrison and probably, more recently, Steve Ely: they are, for me, socially engaged and make their linguistically-skilled case on behalf of the in- or less articulate. But then John Cooper Clark, Lou Reed and others of that ilk have a sharp take on contemporary society as well, and probably communicate more directly with more people than the Harrison/Ely voice does.
Be that as it may, what to write and how to write it, seems much to have exercised Thomas Arnold’s ruminative son. There’s a telling section in Hamilton’s book where he discusses Matthew’s ‘railing against “thinking-aloud” poetry’, specifically with Tennyson in mind. ‘Tennyson, Arnold had told Clough in 1847, was decorative rather than penetrative (dawdling in the universe’s “painted shell”): he had a certain facility but was “deficient in intellectual power”’. And it was that intellectual power that Arnold felt should constitute sound and Good Poetry. He needed to ‘define an attitude to notions of modernity that was in part a resistance to the easy topicality of rising poetic stars like Alexander Smith and Philip James Bailey – forgotten now but big names of the day’ and part of the group of poets called The Spasmodics whose raison d’etre was to “exhibit the passions in that state of excitement which distinguishes one from the other.”
And Arnold, given his education and moral training, plumped for classical models and sub-epic pieces such as ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ and, in my view, the less successful ‘Balder Dead’.
Nowadays, not unnaturally, these are largely forgotten poems and don’t much excite. Not that that takes away from the purpose behind their writing: to present the reader with something written in significantly styled language sufficient to give importance to the subject matter in which human beings (or being with recognizably human characteristics) find themselves tested physically, emotionally and morally: serious matters, not inaccessibly presented , but in a way that is grander, more aspirational in tone, than ordinary life.
Poetry with a sense that it must be greater than self, which speaks articulately and compassionately to the individual and comments on the social circumstances that produce modern experience - that’s what I look for. (That’s why I think Harrison’s ‘V’ is such a great poem.) And maybe more modern poets than I recognise do that, and probably, one has to face it, more often than honest, serious-minded, duty-bound Mathew Arnold managed to do.
Hamilton’s book makes thought-provoking biographical reading, and says something too about the effect of an intensely moral and disciplined upbringing on the creative forces of Thomas Arnold’s good and decent son.
I think Hamilton’s take on Arnold has encouraged me that it is not unusual or unacceptable to think of Arnold in this way: it seems to me he is not writing an apologia for Arnold, and does not try to rehabilitate poems that do not deserve rehabilitation. Because I felt he was on my side, I was keen to see what his take on this Victorian figure was.
Well, there’s a certain amount of biographical stuff which I found interesting, often drawing on correspondence, especially with his sister Jane who, though not discouraging, could be relied on to be honest in her opinions of his verse. Much of the biographical detail concerns, of course, Arnold’s father, the legend that is Arnold of Rugby and ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. A hard act to follow, and one whose influence was felt by all his children especially when it came to duty and to education: Matthew became a Chief Inspector of Schools in England, his brother Tom became an Inspector of Schools in Tasmania and another brother, William, was Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab.
But Matthew, something of a dandiacal character, felt himself drawn to write poetry and wasn’t actually, judged by what are still considered his best poems, without a gift for both lyric and epic. What he does seem to have been without, however, was a conscience that clear enough to allow him to do it, and he had a similarly debilitating uncertainty about what was an appropriate poetry to be writing.
With this, I am peculiarly sympathetic. Having enjoyed writing poetry, I have stopped as I find myself afflicted by a sense that there’s so much already out there and so much of it, although not unworthy, inept or unenjoyable, that lacks socially significant substance, the great corpus of contemporary literature doesn’t need another person contributing to it. It’s because I’m without a clear idea of what poetry should be about, or what distinguishes a Poet from a poet, that I don’t write it any more. The nearest I can get to the idea of a modern Poet – and my knowledge, frankly, of Good Modern Poetry is not extensive, so my opinion is very likely inaccurate – is Tony Harrison and probably, more recently, Steve Ely: they are, for me, socially engaged and make their linguistically-skilled case on behalf of the in- or less articulate. But then John Cooper Clark, Lou Reed and others of that ilk have a sharp take on contemporary society as well, and probably communicate more directly with more people than the Harrison/Ely voice does.
Be that as it may, what to write and how to write it, seems much to have exercised Thomas Arnold’s ruminative son. There’s a telling section in Hamilton’s book where he discusses Matthew’s ‘railing against “thinking-aloud” poetry’, specifically with Tennyson in mind. ‘Tennyson, Arnold had told Clough in 1847, was decorative rather than penetrative (dawdling in the universe’s “painted shell”): he had a certain facility but was “deficient in intellectual power”’. And it was that intellectual power that Arnold felt should constitute sound and Good Poetry. He needed to ‘define an attitude to notions of modernity that was in part a resistance to the easy topicality of rising poetic stars like Alexander Smith and Philip James Bailey – forgotten now but big names of the day’ and part of the group of poets called The Spasmodics whose raison d’etre was to “exhibit the passions in that state of excitement which distinguishes one from the other.”
And Arnold, given his education and moral training, plumped for classical models and sub-epic pieces such as ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ and, in my view, the less successful ‘Balder Dead’.
Nowadays, not unnaturally, these are largely forgotten poems and don’t much excite. Not that that takes away from the purpose behind their writing: to present the reader with something written in significantly styled language sufficient to give importance to the subject matter in which human beings (or being with recognizably human characteristics) find themselves tested physically, emotionally and morally: serious matters, not inaccessibly presented , but in a way that is grander, more aspirational in tone, than ordinary life.
Poetry with a sense that it must be greater than self, which speaks articulately and compassionately to the individual and comments on the social circumstances that produce modern experience - that’s what I look for. (That’s why I think Harrison’s ‘V’ is such a great poem.) And maybe more modern poets than I recognise do that, and probably, one has to face it, more often than honest, serious-minded, duty-bound Mathew Arnold managed to do.
Hamilton’s book makes thought-provoking biographical reading, and says something too about the effect of an intensely moral and disciplined upbringing on the creative forces of Thomas Arnold’s good and decent son.
August 12, 2021
Matthew Arnold slipped through the cracks in his time. His poetic concerns and style did not fit the fashion of the time. Indeed, they prefigure the Modernists. One only needs look at "Dover Beach" to realize this - the loss of faith and optimism. While Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were composing meter that followed a poetic scheme and a thematic plan that pleased their audiences (they're good but they were popular as well), Arnold used the tough educational methodologies of his schoolmaster father to probe deeper into the meaning of it all.
Unlike Keats, perhaps it is Arnold's tragedy to live too long but also not long enough. Arnold lived long enough to see his poems mostly neglected in their prime but, likely from his viewpoint, probably for all time. Although untrue, his poems fit right into the Hardy vein in some ways, and certainly influenced Yeats to an extent. He is one of the missing links between Tennyson and modernism. This brief book covers his life (ending when he renounces poetry in middle age) and his struggles to make his poetry known but true. Good, though I wasn't floored by it. Considering there really aren't many books on Arnold alone, this is still the current best bet.
Unlike Keats, perhaps it is Arnold's tragedy to live too long but also not long enough. Arnold lived long enough to see his poems mostly neglected in their prime but, likely from his viewpoint, probably for all time. Although untrue, his poems fit right into the Hardy vein in some ways, and certainly influenced Yeats to an extent. He is one of the missing links between Tennyson and modernism. This brief book covers his life (ending when he renounces poetry in middle age) and his struggles to make his poetry known but true. Good, though I wasn't floored by it. Considering there really aren't many books on Arnold alone, this is still the current best bet.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews