Matthew arnolds biography

atthew Arnold, poet and critic, was born at Laleham on the Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, historian and great headmaster of Rugby, and of Mary (Penrose) Arnold.

He was educated at Winchester; Rugby, where he won a prize for a poem on "Alaric at Rome"; and Oxford, to which he went as a Scholar of Balliol College in 1841, and where he won the Newdigate Prize for "Cromwell, A Prize Poem," and received a Second Class in litterae humaniores, to the regret though hardly to the surprise of his friends.

Matthew arnolds biography

Always outwardly a worldling, he had not yet revealed the "hidden ground of thought and of austerity within" which was to appear in his poetry. "During these years," writes Thomas Arnold the younger in Passages in a Wandering Life, "my brother was cultivating his poetic gift carefully, but his exuberant, versatile nature claimed other satisfactions.

His keen bantering talk made him something of a social lion among Oxford men, he even began to dress fashionably."

In 1845, howe