Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an inspector of schools for thirty-five years and, in the time left over, the most influential critic of the Victorian age and one of its finest poets. Dover Beach and The Scholar-Gipsy are in every anthology; the Poems the lists assign include them. The Study of Poetry, with its touchstones and its claim that poetry would replace religion, and Culture and Anarchy, with its Hebraism and Hellenism, set the terms of English criticism for a century. His father was headmaster of Rugby, and he never quite escaped the school.