TY - CHAP

T1 - Unravelling Pater's English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism

AU - Østermark-Johansen, Lene

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Pater’s short pieces of prose fiction, known as his ‘Imaginary Portraits’, can be read as literary criticism in another mode, dealing with English literature and also with European literature more broadly. This chapter focuses on the portraits with an English setting: ‘The Child in the House’ (1878), the relatively polished, but unfinished fragment ‘An English Poet’ (1878-79), and the short manuscript fragment for Pater’s third novel entitled ‘Thistle’ (late 1880s). They are texts in which Pater engages with English literature of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: with Shakespeare, Browne, and Bunyan; and with Coleridge, Lamb, and Wordsworth––writers who had been or would become the subjects of his literary essays or reviews in the 1870s and 1880s. In his concern with Bildung, with the becoming of the poet or aesthete, Pater follows Sainte-Beuve and his portraits littéraires quite closely, and the English portraits should be read as the confluence of English Romanticism and the influence from Sainte-Beuve. They are a celebration of the power of the imagination, of the powers of reading, and the effects of literature on the formation of character. In the case of the English poet, I shall explore wherein his ‘Englishness’ consists, given that, in terms of blood-lines, he is Anglo-French. Much of this Englishness may be related to the English language and his reading of English literature, but, I would argue, ‘An English Poet’ also becomes the forerunner of the essay on ‘Style’ a decade later. Anglo-French discourse, the style is the man, Wordsworth, Flaubert: all are contained in this earlier imaginary portrait.

AB - Pater’s short pieces of prose fiction, known as his ‘Imaginary Portraits’, can be read as literary criticism in another mode, dealing with English literature and also with European literature more broadly. This chapter focuses on the portraits with an English setting: ‘The Child in the House’ (1878), the relatively polished, but unfinished fragment ‘An English Poet’ (1878-79), and the short manuscript fragment for Pater’s third novel entitled ‘Thistle’ (late 1880s). They are texts in which Pater engages with English literature of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: with Shakespeare, Browne, and Bunyan; and with Coleridge, Lamb, and Wordsworth––writers who had been or would become the subjects of his literary essays or reviews in the 1870s and 1880s. In his concern with Bildung, with the becoming of the poet or aesthete, Pater follows Sainte-Beuve and his portraits littéraires quite closely, and the English portraits should be read as the confluence of English Romanticism and the influence from Sainte-Beuve. They are a celebration of the power of the imagination, of the powers of reading, and the effects of literature on the formation of character. In the case of the English poet, I shall explore wherein his ‘Englishness’ consists, given that, in terms of blood-lines, he is Anglo-French. Much of this Englishness may be related to the English language and his reading of English literature, but, I would argue, ‘An English Poet’ also becomes the forerunner of the essay on ‘Style’ a decade later. Anglo-French discourse, the style is the man, Wordsworth, Flaubert: all are contained in this earlier imaginary portrait.

U2 - 10.1017/9781108869447.006

DO - 10.1017/9781108869447.006

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-1-108-83589-3

SP - 57

EP - 72

BT - Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Literature

A2 - Martindale, Charles

A2 - Østermark-Johansen, Lene

A2 - Prettejohn, Elizabeth

PB - Cambridge University Press

CY - Cambridge

ER -