More than many writers, Matthew Arnold has generated opposing reactions for different readers and he resists simple classification. As a poet, he has been seen generally as significant although he has never been widely popular. As a critic, he remains a common reference point in literature, cultural studies and the humanities, although he is more subject to denigration than admiration. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of English critics who were influenced by Marxism identified him as a thinker who sought to protect the interests of the propertied classes, both in his criticism of working-class politics and in his writing about the need to replace class allegiances with culture. His absolutism and detachment are also a source of criticism today, and despite his appeal to some liberal thinkers he can readily appear an unsympathetic figure in a multicultural era on account of his insensitivity to cultural difference. To convey his absolutism, critics mention his authoritarian-sounding calls for ‘force till right is ready’, ‘the best that has been known and thought in the world’ (III: 266, 282), or his literary ‘touchstones’; or they allude to Arnoldian culture, which is associated with exclusivity. On such grounds, his importance is now in question.

From the 1930s to the 1960s his criticism was widely admired for a liberal humanism that values wholeness in the individual and seeing life whole. The influential English literary critic, F. R. Leavis, celebrated Arnold's democratic tendencies and ethical force, and one of the founders of English Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, saw him as ‘a great and important figure in nineteenth-century thought… we can hardly speak better than in his own best spirit’.