W. B. Yeats famously asserted of Victorian poetry, “My generation, because it disliked Victorian rhetorical moral fervour, came to dislike all rhetoric. In France, where there was a similar movement, a poet had written, ‘Take rhetoric and wring its neck.’” Yeats had some grounds for associating Victorian poetry with rhetoric. For example, “Dover Beach” (1867), Matthew Arnold's famous meditation on the relation of erotic love to human mortality and uncertainty, has seemed forced to some readers. Walt Whitman objected to Arnold as a “dude of literature,” and the poem's diction has seemed unnecessarily fine to others. In this context “rhetoric” signifies inflated language and unearned ponderousness. Having contrasted the waves' constant breaking on shore to a steadily ebbing “sea of faith” in prior stanzas, Arnold's speaker concludes,