Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach An

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complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment. In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
New types of poetry were surfacing, scholars at Oxford and Cambridge began writing in lyrics, narratives, verse, dramas, epics, and prose. In 1857 Matthew Arnold was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time ...

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Beach, written in 1867, is Matthew Arnold’s complaint on the loss of Christianity and a fear of being alone. Arnold shows this through literary techniques. The poem is written in free verse with no particular meter or rhyme scheme, although some of the words do rhyme. He uses imagery in the poem to describe the setting and mood. The poem begins two-part stanzas, the first that is promising and hopeful; the second replaces optimism with a reality that is grim. Arnold uses contrast when he appeals to the sense of sight in the first section and to hearing in the second. He uses alliteration of “f” in line 2, and the “g” in line 4 to make the opening of the ...

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