Literary Birthday – 24 December – Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was born 24 December 1822 and died 15 April 1888.

Quotes

1. The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
2. If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.
3. Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
4. Journalism is literature in a hurry.
5. For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
6. Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
7. Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
8. The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic. He is known as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He is the author of Dover Beach and Other Poems. Among the major Victorian writers in the second half of the twentieth century, Arnold is unique in that he was well known for both his poetry and his prose.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matthew_Arnold.jpg

Elliott & Fry, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar