...Paul Zietlow Copyright © 1982 by Duke University Press 1982 FAILURE AND INTEGRITY IN MATTHEW ARNOLD’S MEROPE By PAULZIETLOW In writing Merope, Matthew Arnold aimed to do no less than reenact in the nineteenth...

..., more moving even than Mérope and Jocasta [Voltairean characters]; she is the model mother and queen. . . . Like the biblical mother, she does not want to be consoled” (Dans les cris déchirants de ses douleurs maternelles, Constance est plus vraie, plus émouvante encore que Mérope et Jocaste; c’est...

... indication of Arnold’s echoes, not only of other poets, but of himself. So far as the echoes of other writers go, there are few surprises: Wordsworth, Byron, Homer, Sophocles (be- cause of Merope), and Carlyle lead the pack; Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Milton, Vergil, and Goethe are not far behind...

... that his vol- umes, three in number (which included, in addition to fifteen of Alfieri’s tragedies, the Merope of Maffei and the Aristodemo of Moiiti), give what may “fairly be deemed to be the whole of those poetical Italian compositions truly deserving that name” ; four out of Alfieri’s...