The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

final touch,—short, bleak and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our
unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the
straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed!
Prompted by a newspaper report of the murder of her illegitimate child by a girl named Wragg; ‘Essays in
Criticism’ First Series (1865) ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’
I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate
the best that is known and thought in the world.
‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’
Philistinism!—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because
we have so much of the thing.
‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) ‘Heinrich Heine’
The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) ‘Joubert’
The absence, in this country, of any force of educated literary and scientific opinion.
‘Essays in Criticism’ First Series (1865) ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’
In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain’.
‘Essays in Criticism’ Second Series (1888) ‘Shelley’; Arnold is quoting from his own essay on Byron in the
same work.
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to
console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what
now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
‘Essays in Criticism’ Second Series (1888) ‘The Study of Poetry’
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is
briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and
composed in the soul.
‘Essays in Criticism’ Second Series (1888) ‘Thomas Gray’
Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.
‘Essays in Criticism’ Second Series (1888) ‘Wordsworth’
His expression may often be called bald...but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with
a baldness full of grandeur.
‘Wordsworth’ in ‘Essays in Criticism’ Second Series (1888)
I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.
Howard Foster Lowry (ed.) ‘The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough’ (1932) 12 February
1853
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and
thus with the history of the human spirit.
‘Literature and Dogma’ (1873) preface
Terms like grace, new birth, justification...terms, in short, which with
St Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.