ught of it--a captain
who first tried it--and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who
put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon,
who said that poetry had 'something divine in it', and was necessary
to the satisfaction of the human mind.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

1822-1888

THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY

[Preface to 'Poems', 1853]

In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the
other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have
already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.

I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the
volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because
the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three
thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a
sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own
opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I
intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek
religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,
having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of
Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to
dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings
of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to
consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles
himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What
those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek
genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared;
the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have
disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;
modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,
we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.

The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if
consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in
any imitation or representation whatever: this is the basis of our
love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all
knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is
consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it
gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is
_not_ in