Matthew Arnold was always a creative and critical writer although his writing life falls into two parts that centre on his poetry and then his criticism. While he continued to write poetry after the publication of his Poems: a New Edition in 1853, this new collection marks his transition from poetry to criticism since it was his third and last volume of poetry. Moreover its ‘Preface’ was the culmination of his poetic thinking. This ‘Preface’ repudiates the melancholy and ‘dialogue of the mind with itself’ in modern poetry, yet many poems that Arnold had written were distinguished by these features. From his appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 he began to write criticism that was more socially concerned and he continued as a critic for the next thirty years. The significance of his turn from poetry to criticism is, then, a central question when considering his life and work. Not only is its meaning for Arnold at issue but also broad questions about the self, literature and society.

His change of direction was accentuated by his new employment and marriage in 1851. Biographers have tended to see a transition from ‘Romantic’ creativity to ‘Victorian’ duty as a husband, father and professional man. Yet Arnold was not straightforwardly a Romantic poet and his transition to criticism can be seen in terms of his new commitment to rational action. The American critic, J. Hillis Miller, in contrast elaborates his ‘strategy of withdrawal from practical involvement’ in his many years of criticism. Miller's influential 1960s’ account of a critic who ‘must hover in the void… sternly and implacably criticising all present cultural forms as false’ importantly perceives how the sense of fragmentation and emptiness in Arnold's poetry still continues in his criticism. His theological reading of writing that is marked by the disappearance of God has contributed to current readings of Arnold's detachment and his reference to Arnold's ‘scrupulously empty phrases’ is still much quoted. Yet in foregrounding Arnold's ‘withdrawal’, Miller overlooks the secular redirection of his gaze in his turn to criticism.