[2] Arnold prefaces the poem with an extract from Glanvill, which tells the story of an impoverished Oxford student who left his studies to join a band of gipsies, and so ingratiated himself with them that they told him many of the secrets of their trade.
Arnold describes ...this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims,[5] and implores the scholar gipsy to avoid all who suffer from it, in case he too should be infected and die.
[6] In an 1857 letter to his brother Tom, referring to their friendship with Theodore Walrond and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold wrote that "The Scholar Gipsy" was "meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced".
[9] It appears in The Oxford Book of English Verse and in some editions of Palgrave's Golden Treasury despite its being, at 250 lines, considerably longer than most of the poems in either anthology.
what they want is something to animate and ennoble them – not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams.We would ask Mr. Arnold to consider whether the acceptance this poem is sure to win, does not prove to him that it is better to forget all his poetic theories, ay, and Homer and Sophocles, Milton and Goethe too, and speak straight out of things which he has felt and tested on his own pulses.