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Matthew Arnold’s career as a writer can seem rather inconsistent. On the one hand, he can appear to be a poet of melancholy, disillusionment and doubt, as in the closing lines of “Dover Beach”. The darkness and confusion depicted there are a recurrent motif, and in many of his early poems he himself displays something of the “icy despair” he ascribes to Senancour, Byron and Shelley. In his later prose writings, on the other hand, he comes across as the self-confident exponent of his own views. This is an unfazed, commanding Arnold, who sets his sights on nothing less than the “disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas”. But continuities between the bleak poet and the poised debater have already been found by Timothy Peltason, for instance, who says that Arnold’s switching from poetry to prose is not a movement “from the inner world to the outer, from subjective to objective”. Rather, the prose is “a [...]mode of refusing these easy divisions and of coming to life in language”. Seen this way, the critical writings reflect the underlying tension between subjective and objective in the relationship between a more rhetorical and a more logical mode of argumentation. How the same tension is reflected in the poetry Peltason does not say. But in my own view, some such conflict certainly informs much of Arnold’s writing, and not least some of the verse he published from 1853 onwards. In that year his thinking about poetry underwent a major shift, triggered by a dissatisfaction he had come to feel with Empedocles on Etna, the long poem which had given the title for the anonymously published collection of just a year earlier. There Empedocles was

<i>Sohrab and Rustum</i> and <i>Balder Dead</i>: Communicating about Communication