SOURCE: Wimsatt, William K., Jr. “Art for Art's Sake.” In Literary Criticism: A Short History, edited by William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, pp. 475-98. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

In the following excerpt, Wimsatt discusses the development of English aestheticism and its association with Walter Pater, James MacNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde.

Aestheticism in England, says a recent writer, “was not a sudden development: the nature of the trend from Keats through Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, even in Arnold's mid-career, not unapparent to the critic who passed the judgment on the great Romantics. The insistence that poetry must be judged as ‘criticism of life’ is the same critic's reaction to the later Romantic tradition; it puts the stress where it seemed to him that it most needed to be put.”¹ Arnold himself has left us such statements as the following in his Preface to...