Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, - to the question: How
to live" (Essays 302). Arnold’s definition of criticism as the “disinterested endeavor to
learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (Norton 824) as well
as his low esteem of “modern” (i.e. Romantic) poetry for what Arnold perceives as its
“prematureness” and its lack of “unity and profoundness of moral impression” clearly
illustrates how he privileges the high canonical works of the classical period (809-810).
Moreover, Arnold claims that these works represent an “infallible touchstone” to which
other works can be compared in order to evaluate their quality:
There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry
belongs to the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good,
than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the
great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.
(NAEL 1421)
Arnold aligns himself with the likes of Samuel Johnson amongst others by sharing the
Horatian belief that canonical texts should “instruct delightfully” and therefore attempt to
display and promote attitudes, behaviors, and values of the highest moral order.
Consequently, he was quickly categorized as an “elitist” and/or a “traditionalist” in the
ensuing canonical debates of the twentieth century because he specifically expressed a
preference for these “dead, white males” while at the same time relying on “timeless
truths,” and advocating what he believed were “universal” values. Guillory points out
that “the Arnoldian representation of literary culture could itself be constructed as an
“ideology,” not least because the literary sensibility was always reappropriated in the
schools as a means of enforcing the cultural distinction of the bourgeoisie” (136).
Like Arnold, T.S. Eliot envisioned high literary works to be “timeless” and fit
within a specific “tradition” whose most prominent quality was to be “universal”:
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