SOURCE: Pater, Walter. “Poems by William Morris.” In Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by James Sambook, pp. 105-17. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974.

In the following essay, originally published in The Westminster Review in 1868, Pater gives a reading of Morris's oeuvre with an emphasis on the mixture of Hellenic, medieval, and modern influences in the poet's works.

This poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or mediaeval life or poetry, nor a disguised reflex of modern sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no actual form of life or simple form of poetry. Greek poetry, mediaeval or modern poetry, projects above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly...