Many of the ideas that appear in Arnolds Preface of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Analysis of the Preface reveals a poet who found a theoretical basis for poetry by which he means literature in general in the dramas of the Greek tragedians particularly Sophocles action is stressed as an indispensable ingredient wholes are preferred to parts the didactic function of literature is promoted