A gift imprisoned

"Matthew Arnold had two lives. In his later years, he was Victorian England's best-known social prophet, educational reformer, and literary critic. In his youth, he was an impassioned lyric poet, deeply at odds with his "damned times". Arnold's poetic life - the life that gave us "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Empedocles on Etna" - was effectively over by the age of forty, when he began to devote all his energies to "purposeful" prose composition." "For about twenty years, however, he made efforts to resist his destiny, and this book is the story of that losing battle. As a biographical narrative, A Gift Imprisoned confronts a number of intriguing puzzles. Chief among these, of course, is the much-pondered Marguerite. Who was she: a dream-girl, an invention born of too much exposure to the novels of George Sand, or a real person met in Switzerland in 1848? Then there is Dr. Arnold himself: a devitalizing ogre or an inspiration? And, overarchingly, there is the matter of Arnold's attitude to his own gifts as a poet: Why did he so early on abandon the poetic life and settle for three decades of drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools? Was it really a fierce love of d