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A Poet's Guide to Britain

Owen Sheers

Fiona Morris

Rupert Edwards

A Poet's Guide to Britain: Episode 4: Matthew Arnold

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Matthew Arnold

Episode 4

Episode 4: Matthew Arnold

BBC Four - A Poet's Guide to Britain, Matthew Arnold

Owen Sheers visits Oxford to explore Matthew Arnold's bleak poem Dover Beach.

Owen Sheers explores poetry set in the British landscape. He tells the story behind Matthew Arnold's bleak but tremendous poem Dover Beach.

Poet and author Owen Sheers presents a series in which he explores six great works of poetry set in the British landscape. Each poem explores a sense of place and identity across Britain and opens the doors to captivating stories about the places and the lives of the poets themselves. 

In 1851, a young school inspector and his wife spent a night of their honeymoon in a hotel in Dover overlooking the beach. Standing at the bedroom window and staring out at the moonlit sea, this newly-married man wrote a poem that sent a chill through his own and future generations - a poem that ends with the shocking conclusion that there is no hope, no comfort and no purpose in life.

Sheers goes in search of this poet, Matthew Arnold, and discovers what drove him to write his bleak but tremendous poem Dover Beach. He goes to Rugby School to delve into Arnold's relationship with his father, the great Victorian headmaster Dr Arnold, and visits Oxford to explore the extraordinary impact that the religious thinker John Henry Newman made on so many young people of the age. He also travels to the Swiss lake resort of Thun, where Arnold lost his heart to a mysterious woman called Marguerite.  

It's the story of a rebellious young man trying to make sense of the world and includes contributions from Archbishop of Canterbury and poet Rowan Williams and rising poetry star, Daljit Nagra.

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Owen Sheers explores six great works of poetry set in the British landscape.

Poet and author Owen Sheers presents a series in which he explores six great works of poetry set in the British landscape.

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