Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) was an English poet and critic, the son of Thomas Arnold, the reforming headmaster of Rugby. For thirty-five years he earned his living as an inspector of schools, while serving from 1857 to 1867 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His poems, among them Dover Beach, The Scholar-Gipsy, Thyrsis and Sohrab and Rustum, express the doubt and melancholy of an age losing its faith. In later life he turned mainly to prose, and Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy made him the leading critic of Victorian England, popularizing phrases such as sweetness and light and the label Philistines for the complacent middle class.