Matthew Arnold's Study of Poetry

I can honestly tell you that while I was reading this I never once looked at the time or counted how many pages I had left. It was like a portal to another dimension that absorbed and took over me. Arnold was a genius, in both his prose writing and poetry. I LOVE him! I think I highlighted the entire thing, but I promise to only chose a few to illustrate my point. "But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry." Although this isn't quite as beautiful as Shelley, it is profound and lovely. I really enjoyed how he tore apart and questioned all works, not just certain ones. Everything is fair game to Arnold. Another of my favorite lines is "indeed there can be no more useful help for the discovering what poetry belongs to the class of 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." His talk of touchstones really fascinates me, because I have had one for years and never known it.