Lawrence was sure what 1918 needed from its poets: "in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment" ("Poetry of the Present"). Juicy though this sounds, the "throb" was not a birth-pang but, like several other arty ideals of the the early twentieth century, an echo of Pater's The Renaissance, which fifty years before Lawrence's "Present" had ended with the assurance that "art comes to you professing a frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake". People who profess to be speaking "frankly" are usually deceiving at least themselves and often trying to deceive others too. As Eliot noted in his essay on Baudelaire, Pater may have imagined he was illustrating the doctrine of Art for Art's sake, whereas he was "expounding it as a theory of life, which is not the same thing at all. — Eric Griffiths, TLS May 14, 2010, p. 5.
General
- Pater's Influence
- Burne-Jones, Pater, and Swinburne as Founders of Later (or Aesthetic) Pre-Raphaelitism
Classical Authors
Contemporaries
- Pater and His Contemporaries
- Aesthetes and Decadents
- Victorianism
- Matthew Arnold
- Pater's Review of Morris's Poems — and Swinburne
- Pater and Swinburne
- Pater, Beerbohm, and Cosmetics: Artifice or Art?
- George Eliot
- Gustave Flaubert
- Darwin
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
- Newman, Arnold, and Pater's Aestheticism (introduction to DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene)
- Newman and the Theology of Marius
- Newman and the Rhetoric of Aestheticism
- Oscar Wilde’s review essay: “Mr. Pater’s Imaginary Portraits”
- Beerbohm on Pater's style
- Heine
- Blake’s meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- John Ruskin
- Oscar Wilde
- W. B. Yeats
Last modified 16 December 2019