Edwin Arnold

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For Arnold's son of the same name, the author of Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation and Phra the Phoenician, see Edwin Lester Arnold.

Sir

Edwin Arnold

KCIE CSI
Born(1832-06-10)10 June 1832
Gravesend, England
Died24 March 1904(1904-03-24) (aged 71)
London, England
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • editor
  • poet
Education
Notable worksThe Light of Asia
Children6, including Edwin Lester Arnold
Signature

Sir Edwin Arnold KCIE CSI (10 June 1832 – 24 March 1904) was an English poet and journalist, who is most known for his work The Light of Asia.[1]

Born in

Jesus Christ, faced mixed reception. Arnold's personal life was marked by multiple marriages, including one to a Japanese woman, reflecting his deep engagement with Japanese culture as evidenced in his writings. An advocate for vegetarianism, he played a significant role in the West London Food Reform Society alongside figures like Mahatma Gandhi
. Arnold died at the age of 77, in London, in 1904.

Biography

Arnold was born at

mutiny of 1857, when he was able to render services for which he was publicly thanked by Lord Elphinstone in the Bombay Council.[3]
Here he received the bias towards, and gathered material for, his future works.

Returning to England in 1861 he worked as a journalist on the staff of The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper with which he continued to be associated as editor for more than forty years, and of which he later became editor-in-chief.[4] It was he who, on behalf of the proprietors of The Daily Telegraph in conjunction with the New York Herald, arranged the journey of H. M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River, and Stanley named after him a mountain to the north-east of Albert Edward Nyanza.[3]

Arnold must also be credited with the first idea of a great trunk line traversing the entire African continent, for in 1874 he first employed the phrase "

Cape to Cairo railway" subsequently popularised by Cecil Rhodes
.

It was, however, as a poet that he was best known to his contemporaries. The literary task which he set before him was the interpretation in English verse of the life and philosophy of the East. His chief work with this object is

Acharya Ram Chandra Shukla
).

In it, in Arnold's own words, he attempted 'by the medium of an imaginary Buddhist votary to depict the life and character and indicate the philosophy of that noble hero and reformer,

Sakyamuni and Jesus offended the taste of some devout Christians.[3]

The latter criticism probably suggested to Arnold the idea of attempting a second narrative poem of which the central figure should be Jesus, the founder of Christianity, as the founder of Buddhism had been that of the first. But though The Light of the World (1891), in which this took shape, had considerable poetic merit, it lacked the novelty of theme and setting which had given the earlier poem much of its attractiveness; and it failed to repeat the success gained by The Light of Asia. Arnold's other principal volumes of poetry were Indian Song of Songs (1875), Pearls of the Faith (1883), The Song Celestial (1885), With Sa'di in the Garden (1888), Potiphar's Wife (1892), Adzuma,[3] or The Japanese Wife (1893), and "Indian Poetry" (1904).

In "

Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita.[6]

Blue plaque, 31 Bolton Gardens, Kensington, London

Personal life

Sir Edwin was married three times.

Persia, Turkey and Siam. One of his six children was the novelist Edwin Lester Arnold
, born in 1857.

He was a founder member, together with

Mahabodhi Society of India and was a close associate of Weligama Sri Sumangala.[9] A blue plaque unveiled in 1931 commemorates Arnold at 31 Bolton Gardens in South Kensington.[10]

Arnold was a vegetarian. He was vice-president of the West London Food Reform Society, a vegetarian group based in Bayswater, founded in 1891, with Josiah Oldfield as president and Mahatma Gandhi as secretary.[11][12] The Society was short-lived and dissolved as soon as Gandhi left Bayswater.[13]

References

  1. ^ Sir Edwin Arnold The New York Times, 25 March 1904
  2. ^ The Feast of Belshazzar: A Prize Poem Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 23 1852, Francis Macpherson, Oxford
  3. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911.
  4. ^ Notices of 'The Light of Asia' Archived 2 September 2018 at the Wayback Machine www.phx-ult-lodge.org.
  5. ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th Edition. Edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 2000 Pp 42
  6. ISBN 1420926012.[permanent dead link
    ]
  7. ^ The Marshall, Michigan, Expounder; 1 April 1904
  8. ^ Arnold, Sir Edwin (1894). Seas and Lands. Longmans, Green.
  9. ^ Oxford University (1879). Trübner's American and oriental literary record. Oxford University. p. 120.
  10. ^ "ARNOLD, SIR EDWIN (1832–1904)". English Heritage. Retrieved 18 August 2012.
  11. ISBN 0-19-513060-X
  12. ISBN 978-0-520-25570-8
  13. ISBN 81-7023-205-8

Attribution:

Further reading

  • Brooks Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West: Sir Edwin Arnold.

External links

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Edwin Arnold
Media offices
Preceded by Editor of The Daily Telegraph
1873–1888 		Succeeded by
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