Born in the age of Romanticism, Matthew Arnold was principally a classicist. He was deeply shocked at the illusions of the Romantic poets. In all fields: social, political, educational and even literary, anarchy was dominant. Arnold expressed his protest against emotional superfluity, subjectivity and the illusions of the poets at his age. He thought Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats dangerous examples for the young poets, though he himself was influenced in some ways by them and that was clearly reflected in some of his poems. Arnold admired the classical masters like Homer and Sophocles as his examples. He looked at the Greek poets as sources of inspiration and guidance. He learned from them that great poetry must be objective not subjective. Arnold, also insisted that a great poet should quit his age and select his literary themes from the far past. Nevertheless, he, conspicuously, resorted to Romanticism with some of its characteristics in a number of his poems which showed the mixture of both classicism and romanticism side by side to delineate his inner feelings and the undertone of his poems. Through that, he exhibited his disappointment and misery towards the variant calamities his society was passing through and the fall of its moral values. Of these poems is Empedocles on Etna, a classical and romantic poem.