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A Caution to Poets

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) · New Poems · 1867

What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.

Where this text comes from

First published in New Poems (1867). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/matthew-arnold_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (4)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27739
https://archive.org/details/poemsofmatthewar00arnouoft
https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofm00arn
https://archive.org/details/inmemoriamawrea00marsgoog

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L4.

Cite this poem

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). “A Caution to Poets.” First published in New Poems (1867). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/matthew-arnold/a-caution-to-poets/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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