Greek Studies

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was an English essayist and art and literary critic. After graduating from Oxford he became acutely interested in literature, beginning to write articles and criticisms. The first of these to be printed was a brief essay upon Coleridge, contributed in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later (January, 1867), his essay on Winckelmann, the first expression of his idealism, appeared in the same review. In the following year his study of Aesthetic Poetry appeared in the Fortnightly Review. By the time his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean appeared, however, he had gathered quite a following. This, his chief contribution to literature, was published early in 1885.

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer known as one of the great stylists. His first and most frequently reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated for an ideal of intense inner life, was interpreted by many as an Aestheticism manifesto (whether stimulating or subversive). Walter Pater, born in Stepney in London's East End, was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a physician who migrated to London in the early nineteenth century to practice medicine among the poor. Dr. Pater died while Walter was an infant, and the family relocated to Enfield. Walter attended Enfield Grammar School and was tutored privately by the headmaster. During his vacations, he visited his aunt and sisters in Heidelberg, Germany, where he studied German and began reading Hegel and German thinkers.