"Dover Beach"
By Matthew Arnold

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff at The University of Virginia, Tonya Howe

Page Images

Sources

London : Macmillan and Co., 1867This digital edition has been transcribed from the first edition of New Poems, published in 1867. Page images courtesy of The University of Virginia Special Collections. "Dover Beach" is Arnold's most celebrated poem, and he began writing it over a decade before its publication and just after his marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman. It encapsulates much of Arnold's thought about the techtonic cultural shifts afoot during the Victorian period, especially around industrialization and its effects. In Culture and Anarchy, which was published at the same time as New Poems, Arnold gives prosaic voice to his view that culture--"the best which has been thought and said in the world"--is a balm or corrective to the mechanizations of the modern world (the quote comes from the preface to Culture and Anarchy). The poem addresses an unknown auditor, perhaps a representation of his spouse, and given the time of its authorship as well as its themes, critics often term "Dover Beach" a honeymoon poem in which love has perhaps a salvific effect.

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

Citation

Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach". New Poems, Macmillan and Co., 1867 , pp 112-114 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Arnold/arnold-dover-beach. Accessed: 2025-04-19T13:31:06.093Z