Hot damn, those are some fine muttonchops! Matthew Arnold by Elliott & Fry 1883, National Portrait Gallery, London

(7) MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

“But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.”

A passage I’m fond of quoting from Arnold’s finest and best known poem, Dover Beach, for desperate last stands or holding one defensive line after another – I did it for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire because of course I did. All roads lead to Rome.

Anyway, Matthew Arnold “was an English poet, essayist, and critic from the Victorian era” – “considered one of the great Victorian poets…and one of the Victorian sages”, the latter for his essays on literary criticism and other topics.

Famously melancholic and pessimistic, particularly with respect to the decline of religious faith – that recurring source of angst and despair for Victorian poets or writers. Indeed, that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar retreating in Dover Beach is the tide going out for “the sea of faith” – that “was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shore”.

Arguably the most melancholic Victorian poet – although Alfred Lord Tennyson would give him a run for his money with Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Shortly after his death, Robert Louis Stevenson quipped about his bleak melancholy – “Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt – but he won’t like God”.

“Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

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Portrait of Lord Byron by English painter Thomas Phillips 1813 (public domain image)

(6) LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

Mad, bad and dangerous to know (according to Lady Caroline Lamb, who had an affair with him)

If Blake was a pioneer of the modern literary mythos, Byron was a pioneer of the modern literary hero or anti-hero – also the self-insert character, modelled on himself and thereafter named as the Byronic Hero, charismatic but deeply flawed.

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”.

The original Byronic hero was the titular character of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – the same epic poem that made that fame and paid for his vices. Although as his longer narrative poems go, I prefer his Don Juan, in which he recast the infamous womanizing Spanish folk legend of Don Juan as more a male ingenue tossed between impulse and circumstance.

Perhaps the best example of a poet who truly lived (and died) their art – the Romantic poet and revolutionary who died fighting for the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence. And by died fighting I mean sadly from the medicine of the day being bled to death from fever rather than, you know, in combat or the more dashing death he might have expected, albeit he still died young.

And yes – he was an actual Lord, “who gave two memorable speeches in the House of Lords”, one for Catholic emancipation.

“She walks in beauty like the night”.

While he made his fame from his longer poems, his short lyric poems appeal to me more to represent him here for this entry – and what else but She Walks in Beauty?

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The Great Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed in the Sun painting by Blake (and featured in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon). And yes – the Great Red Dragon does squats and doesn’t skip leg day

(5) WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wildflower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour”

Romantic mystic poet – “everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth”.

Inspired The Doors through Aldous Huxley – “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”.

Also one of the first comics or multimedia creators, since he was also a painter and printmaker who designed his visual art around his poetry and vice versa.

Poetry or mythology, that is, as Blake was one of the pioneers for creating his own literary mythos or Verse (heh) in the parlance of modern popular culture (and TV Tropes). The Blake Poetry & Visual Art Universe, as it were, in the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only trippier – “I must create a system or be enslav’d by another man’s”.

“Tyger tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night”

Blake excelled in poetic phrases and aphorisms but if I were to pick one of his whole poems for this entry it would be The Tyger, even if does have the same rhythm as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was one of His Songs of Experience, in which each poem corresponded to one of his poems in his Songs of Innocence as a matched pair. The counterpart of The Tyger was The Lamb, but whereas latter invokes images of God knitting the lamb, the former is a fiery image of God literally forging the tiger.

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Yes – I couldn’t resist this pun from Rocky & Bulwinkle for the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam. And yes – the metafictional canned audience groaned too

(4) RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Not bad for a Persian poet getting pissed – which is what the Rubaiyat is when you boil it down.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, given the religious prohibition on alcohol in Islam – which lends itself as the springboard for existential ennui or philosophical musings on religion and life itself.

The Rubaiyat is “the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubaiyat) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed the Astronomer-Poet of Persia”.

Translation that is in the very loosest sense – indeed, FitzGerald himself apparently referred to it as a ‘transmogrification’.

“Many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to his source material at all…To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely based on Omar’s quatrains rather than a translation in the narrow sense.”

For that matter, “the authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain” – he was famed as an astronomer and mathematician, with the earliest references to his poetry being substantially after his death and “the extant manuscripts containing collections attributed to Omar are dated much too late to enable a reconstruction of a body of authentic verses”. There is an implausibly large number of quatrains attributed to him – varying from 1,200 to more than 2,000 – and “sceptical scholars point out that the entire tradition may be pseudigraphic”.

Fortunately, FitzGerald didn’t ‘translate’ or write that many quatrains. His original 1859 edition was a much more modest 75 quatrains, expanded in subsequent editions to the final edition of 101 quatrains – or a mere 404 lines.

Although “commercially unsuccessful at first”, the Rubaiyat subsequently became both highly popular and influential, albeit peaking in the 1880s – “the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous Omar Khayyam clubs were formed and there was a fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat”.

Of course, it helps that the quatrains are so eminently quotable.

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