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[In "Empedocles on Etna"] 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; modem problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.
Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree oft his quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. ...
Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth's expostulation with sleep –
'Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge ...'
and take, as well, Hamlet's dying request to Horatio –
'If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story ...'
These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate.
Matthew Arnold: Preface to Poems (1853), and The Study of Poetry (Introduction to 'The English Poets,' ed., T.H. Ward, 1880); both contained in "Selections From the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold" (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, USA, 1913); online version made available by Project Gutenberg.
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