The Lady of Shalott
Everyone reads it as the artist sealed off from life. But the 1842 revision strips away the explanation and leaves something stranger and crueler: a death received by the world as a pretty corpse.
Theme
isolation
3 poems
isolation
Matthew Arnold
The Victorian poet and critic behind “Dover Beach”: a life spent bridging faith and doubt, Romantic feeling and classical restraint, poetry and the criticism that made him the “sage” of his age.
Darkness
An apocalyptic lyric from 1816, “Darkness” imagines a sunless world — grandeur without comfort, entropy without appeal.