First given as lectures from the Oxford chair of poetry and printed in the Cornhill Magazine, these chapters urge the English to value the old literatures of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Arnold surveys the Mabinogion and Irish bardic verse, then claims a Celtic gift for melancholy, natural magic and style in English poetry.
Influential on the Celtic revival, though its talk of racial temperaments belongs to the 1860s. Download the free EPUB.