A Longing Like Despair: Arnold's Poetry of Pessimism

Though critics of Arnold have long recognized the profound bleakness of his poetry, its tragic view of life, Alan Grob's A Longing Like Despair is the first book-length study that takes that dark vision as the interpretive key to the poetry and as justification for Matthew Arnold's claim to be in the vanguard of an emergent modernity. A major aim of Grob's study is to show Arnold as poet to be possessed of far greater philosophic depth and subtlety than his critics have usually credited him with by identifying the deep affinities and shared weltanschauung of his poetic vision with the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer, the major European philosopher whose insistence on the cosmic opposition between the world as will and the world as idea provided the most important philosophic alternative in the nineteenth century to the age's otherwise dominant progressive historicism.