Matthew Arnold, English Poet and Social Critic
Matthew Arnold (December 24, 1822 - April 15, 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. Sage writing was a genre of creative nonfiction popular in the Victorian era. He was a familiar figure at the Athenaeum Club, a frequent diner-out and guest at great country houses, fond of fishing and shooting, and a lively conversationalist, with a self-consciously cultivated air combining foppishness and Olympian grandeur. He read constantly, widely, and deeply, and in the intervals of supporting himself and his family by the quiet drudgery of school inspecting, filled notebook after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic tone. In his writings, he often baffled and sometimes annoyed his contemporaries by the apparent contradiction between his urbane, even frivolous manner in controversy, and the seriousness of his critical views and the melancholy, almost plaintive note of much of his poetry. He is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. He died suddenly in 1888 of heart failure, at the age of 65, when running to meet a tram.
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