Matthew Arnold

In the spring of 1863, James Byrne, a reverend in the Anglican Church of Ireland, offered a theory of national poetics predicated in terms of ‘racial’ characteristics for his contribution to the first series of ‘Afternoon Lectures on English Literature’. From the ‘unsectarian’ 1 setting of Dublin’s Museum of Industry on College Green, he observed a hard and fast distinction between the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by locating the quick-witted, emotional sort that he called ‘Celts’ largely on the Irish side of the Irish Sea, and the dim-witted, rational sort that he called ‘Anglo-Saxons’ largely on the British. 2 Byrne tracked the intersections and traced the subdivisions of these types to build his case for an English literary lineage that starts with Spenser and Shakespeare, excludes Milton, but includes the Scots poet Robert Burns, with the exquisite natural details of his verse representing an irrefutably English literary quality inherited strictly on the Anglo-Saxon side of this divide. From Dryden through Cowper to Wordsworth, Byrne extended the Anglo-Saxon line to include Tennyson at the end of what he considered an unbroken chain that linked the Victorian present to the Elizabethan past. Shakespeare rather than Milton served as the supreme example of ‘English characteristics’ in this context: In Milton, on the contrary, there is a striking absence of English characteristics. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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