Discussion Questions:
1657:

• What, according to Arnold, should literature address?

• Why did Arnold favor classical poetry?
• What problems did Arnold have with his contemporary society?
• In what ways does Arnold's poetry resemble Wordsworth's?

• Why did Arnold largely abandon poetry after the mid-1850s?

• How do Arnold's thoughts on poetry compare with Wordsworth's and Percy Shelley's?

• Explain:  "It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the greater good of society, voluntarily doom himself into impotence and obscurity in another" (1686).
• Explain:  "The critical faculty is lower than the inventive" (1686).
• See also:  "The critical power is of lower rank than the creative" (1686).  Is Arnold being unnecessarily repetitive?  Explain.

• Explain:  "The exercise of the creative power in the production of great works of literature or art . . . is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible" (1687).
• Explain:  "Creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the philosopher" (1687).
• Explain:  "The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery" (1687).
• Explain:  "For the creation of a master-work  in literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment" (1687).
• Explain:  "The critical power . . . tends to establish an order of ideas . . . to make the best ideas prevail" (1687).
• Explain:  "A poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it" (1687).

• Explain:  "The English poetry of the first quarter of the century . . . did not know enough" (1688).
• Explain:  "In the England of the first quarter of this century, there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a  culture and a force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany" (1688).
• Explain:  "All danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared" (1688).

• What does Arnold mean by "disinterestedness"?
• Explain:  "Its business is . . . simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas" (1689).
• Explain:  "Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second" (1689).

• Explain: "The little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do" (1691).

• Explain Arnold's juxtaposition of Roebuck and Wragg.

• Explain: "In no other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key" (1692).
• Explain:  "The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfies them" (1692).
• Explain:  "It is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service" (1692).;

• Explain Arnold's discussion of terrae filii.

• Why, according to Arnold, must the English literary critic "dwell much on foreign thoughts" (1694)?
• Explain:  "It is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it, . . . that the critic will generally do most good to his readers" (1694).
• What, finally, is Arnold's definition of culture?

• Explain:  "The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light" (1697). (See also footnote to 1695)
• Explain:  "Culture . . . seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere" (1697).

• Explain:  "Freedom . . . was one of those things which we thus worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired" (1698).
• How does Arnold define "the State"?

• Explain:  "The moment it is put before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed" (1700).
• Explain:  "The worship of the mere freedom to do as one likes is worship of machinery" (1700).

• What are "the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism" (1701)?

• What is "the uppermost idea," respectively, of Hellenism and Hebraism?

• With which tradition does Arnold associate Puritanism? Explain.

• Explain:  "The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points" (1704).

• Explain: "Without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection" (1705).