ABSTRACT
The literary implications of aestheticism were brought out most clearly in connection with poetry. Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his Tales of Mystery and Imagination and for a few poems, such as Annabel Lee and The Raven; but his ideas on poetry were influential beyond the English–speaking world. Poe divides the human mind into 'Pure Intellect, Taste and the Moral Sense'. In The Philosophy of Composition, he declares: Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. With a scepticism recalling Pater Moore urges that only 'the world of things' is permanent. The rest of Moore's introduction consists of a faindy Wildean dialogue between himself and the poets, John Freeman and Walter de Ia Mare. In Moore, the idea of pure poetry reached an extreme which Pater did not envisage. In his criticism, Pater is strongly conscious of the man behind the work and of the personal vision embodied in it.
