The Study of Poetry Themes

“The Study of Poetry” was first published as Arnold’s introduction to an anthology of English poetry, and its primary purpose is to provide readers with a method for distinguishing what Arnold calls “classic” poetry from poetry that is merely good or—worse—inferior. Underlying Arnold’s project in this essay is the idea that poetry has something special to offer readers and a special role in human affairs, which Arnold describes as poetry’s high destiny.

Arnold’s…

“The Study of Poetry” is an old-fashioned essay in many ways, and Arnold might seem especially old-fashioned in his unwavering insistence that readers not only can distinguish excellent works from inferior ones but that they must do so. Indeed, “The Study of Poetry” is constructed around this principle, since it is primarily a guide to distinguishing “poetry of a high order of excellence” from other kinds of poetry, such as the merely good and the…

Arnold’s primary argument in “The Study of Poetry” is fundamentally an elitist one: reading poetry, he claims, is a better way of spending one’s time than other, more popular pursuits, and within poetry itself there is a group of “classic” poets, such as Dante and Shakespeare, who are to be regarded as clearly superior to all others. What’s more, Arnold makes it clear that it is not enough simply to read poetry in…