Aesthetic Poetry : From Appreciations, 1889

By Pater, Walter Horatio

Book Id: WPLBN0000673320
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.2 MB
Reproduction Date: 2007

Title:	Aesthetic Poetry : From Appreciations, 1889
Author:	Pater, Walter Horatio
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Poetry
Collections:	Poetry Collection, The Victorian Prose Archive Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	The Victorian Prose Archive


Citation APA MLA Chicago Horatio Pater, B. W., & Alfred J. Drak, E. B. (n.d.). Aesthetic Poetry : From Appreciations, 1889. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/

Description
Victorian Literature

Excerpt
Excerpts: THE aesthetic? poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval poetry, nor only an idealization of modern life and sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no simple form of poetry, no actual form of life. Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates be- yond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or ?earthly paradise.? It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life...