Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Matthew Arnold coined this formulation while developing his influential Victorian theory of poetry in the 1850s. In the Preface to his 1853 volume of Poems, Arnold argues against treating poetry as mere personal “expression” or as ornament, insisting instead on its serious, ethical-intellectual function. Writing amid debates about Romantic subjectivity, industrial modernity, and the waning authority of traditional religion, Arnold presents poetry as a disciplined mode of understanding human experience. His phrase frames poetry as a kind of evaluative engagement with life—yet one governed by the distinctive standards of the art itself (“poetic truth” and “poetic beauty”), not by philosophy, theology, or didactic moralizing.

Arnold’s sentence defines poetry as a form of “criticism” not in the narrow sense of reviewing books, but as a searching appraisal of human life—its emotions, conduct, and meaning. The key limitation is that poetry must perform this appraisal under its own artistic laws: it must be true in a specifically poetic way (faithful to experience, imaginatively and emotionally convincing) and beautiful in form (language, rhythm, structure). The claim elevates poetry to a serious cultural role while also protecting it from crude moral instruction: poetry can illuminate and judge life, but only by remaining genuinely poetic rather than becoming prose argument or sermon.

“Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.”