Selected Writings of Walter Pater (Morningside Books) by H Bloom

by Walter Pater

PHarold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from iThe Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies/i, and iSketches and Reviews/i, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects#58; from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Art

Paperback

First published April 1, 1982

About the author

People know British writer Walter Horatio Pater for his volumes of aesthetic criticism, including Appreciations (1889).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...

Reviews

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

' La Gioconda is Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come",....she is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the graves....'

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems pretty clear that Pater gave birth to the aesthetic movement and heavily influenced Wilde. His short story, "The Child in the House," is the magnum opus of flowery writing and the philosophy of intensely acute, sensitive, and focused aesthetic perception.
In discussing the works of another writer, Pater argued that this man "(Saw) things always by the light of an understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the whole mechanism of humanity and seeing also the manner, the outward mode or fashion, always in strict connection with the spiritual condition which determined it..." These words of Pater's could be very well be appropriated to his own skill in perceiving the subtleties of the world.

[Daniel]

"Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of a fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age." Also, my copy of this book has doilies on it.

[E. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this for a class, so...