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Matthew Arnold's five long poems were published between 1852 and 1867. In these poems (Empedocles on Etna, Tristram and Iseult, Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead and Merope) Arnold tries to analyze a number of themes, like nature, moral values, poetics, and the place of authority in society. His analysis is dialectical, and one notices great distress and an inability to resolve these issues. This thesis examines Arnold's confusion, as well as his eventual calm acceptance of life in all its contradictions. It concludes subsequently that Arnold has a genuine desire to find personal dialectical syntheses where possible.

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During Matthew Arnold's lifetime England was in permanent transition: the emergence of a modern industrial society, the new science and liberalized Christianity, and the democratic and humanitarian movements. To be a writer during this time required a curious and precarious balances an alternation of steadfastness and change. Arnold's moving back and forth between the traditions of romanticism and rationalism does present a challenge to the contemporary reader; no single or systematic approach can be applied to his works. An examination of a selection of Arnold's poems, written predominantly between 1845 and 1857, shows the author's reassessment of man's place in the new cosmology as necessitated by the scientific and technological advances of the century. The poems selected also suggest movement away from the romantic concept of the greatness of the past and yesterday's larger-than-life hero toward an acceptance of the best life as represented by the present generation of men. Arnold's theory, that the best self or right reason manifests itself in heroic men, in leaders, and confirms ordinary men, is found throughout the poems studied.

My study looks at the influence that Matthew Arnold, 19th century English poet and literary critic, had on John Dewey, American pragmatist and educational philosopher. While the influence of Arnold on Dewey was more pervasive than I had expected, my real purpose in writing this dissertation was to discover a middle ground between the educational philosophies the two men espoused and to construe a fuller approach to a pluralistic educational philosophy. I have looked at four aspects of mind that draw Arnold and Dewey into close correspondence. The first aspect I have called the tentacled mind from Dewey's favored metaphor of the mind as having tentacles that reach out and encounter directly the physical world. This aspect of mind allows me to look at the common use that both Arnold and Dewey made of the term "experience." The second aspect of mind I call the critical mind. I have explored this aspect of mind by looking at a brief history of English literary criticism from Dryden to Stanley Fish. The third aspect of mind is the intentional mind which deals with the rhetorical-hermeneutic relationship of mind to the intentionality of other voices and to its own intentionality. This aspect crosses into reader response theory, but I have found within it results that differ significantly from traditional reader-response theory. The final aspect of mind I have called reflective-response. In both Arnold and Dewey the reflective aspects of the mind differ widely from more contemplative conceptions of the mind in a reflective state; most notably for both Arnold and Dewey the reflective mind is never passive. I believe that when these four aspects of mind are brought together they amount to a truly pluralistic educational philosophy. In the course of my argument I have, as well, identified a need to rehabilitate both the concept of intentionality and that of authority. / text