Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

Walter Pater's 1889 collection assembles his most incisive critical essays into a sustained meditation on what it means to truly attend to art. The centerpiece, 'A Essay on Style,' stands as one of the most elegant prose essays in English, a self-aware examination of how the critic's own language becomes an act of criticism. Pater turns his attention to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems with sensitivity born of genuine kinship, to the Baroque magnificence of Thomas Browne with infectious admiration, and to Shakespeare's Problem Plays with the kind of close reading that would later shape New Criticism. Throughout, Pater practices what he preaches: that style is not ornament but honesty, that the critic's duty is to reproduce in prose the 'glamour' of the original work. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the Aesthetic Movement, in the philosophy of art, or simply in the pleasure of beautiful thinking rendered in beautiful sentences.