Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold — son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School — spent thirty-five years as a government inspector of schools, crisscrossing England by train and grading compositions, while becoming the most influential critic of the Victorian age.

His permanent poem is "Dover Beach" (1867), possibly begun on his honeymoon in 1851: the calm sea, the lights on the French coast, and then the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith going out. Its plea — "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" — turns a crisis of belief into one of the great love poems.

In middle age he largely gave up poetry for criticism, arguing that culture meant pursuing "the best which has been thought and said."