English · 1822–1888
Matthew Arnold was poet, critic, and school inspector — the central figure of Victorian literary criticism. His poetry (Dover Beach, The Scholar-Gipsy, Thyrsis) defined the melancholy of the Victorian crisis of faith; his critical essays (Culture and Anarchy, Essays in Criticism) established the humanist tradition that literature is morally formative. He served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford and spent decades as a government inspector of schools.