Selected Essays

About Walter Pater

Walter Horatio Pater was born in East London in 1839 and lived for a time in Enfield before the Pater household moved to Canterbury in 1853. There Walter attended the Kings School proceeding in 1858 to the Queens College Oxford as an undergraduate. In 1864 having remained in Oxford he was made a fellow of Brasenose College where he taught Classics and Philosophy. He retained his fellowship for the rest of his life. From around the time of this appointment Pater began publishing critical essays on literature and art gradually gaining a reputation for fine idiosyncratic prose sceptical philosophy and a distinctive aestheticist outlook. Some of these essays were included in his first book Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) which made his name not only as a stylist and perceptive critic but also as a controversial thinker whose sympathy with the `pagan sensibility and the `epicurean mode of life attracted considerable hostility. Other critical essays were collected in the 1889 volume Appreciations while Paters historical novel Marius the Epicurean had appeared in 1885 and some of his works of short fiction had been gathered together in a volume entitled Imaginary Portraits in 1887. Living with his two unmarried sisters and dividing his time between West London and his Oxford college Pater had become one of the most important figures in the British Aesthetic Movement. His essays on critical theory helped to shape the values of many younger writers and artists while his subtle representations of various aesthetic and philosophical temperaments both in his critical studies and in his fictional narratives exercised a large influence on notions of conduct taste and moral feeling in certain artistic and intellectual spheres. In 1893 was published his final book Plato and Platonism based on a series of lectures he had delivered to Oxford students. After an attack of rheumatic fever or pleurisy Pater died suddenly of heart failure in Oxford in 1894. His grave may be seen there in the Holywell Cemetery. In the following years Paters friends oversaw the publication of several further volumes of previously uncollected essays including Greek Studies (1895) Miscellaneous Studies (1895) and Essays from the Guardian (1896) as well as an unfinished novel Gaston de Latour (1896).; Alex Wong is a literary scholar living in Cambridge where he is currently a Research Fellow of St Johns College. His critical book The Poetry of Kissing in Early Modern Europe is published by D. S. Brewer (2017) and his studies of English literature have appeared in various periodicals. Poems Without Irony a first collection of his own verse was published by Carcanet in 2016 and for Carcanet Classics (formally the Fyfield series) he has also edited the Selected Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne (2015).