Chapter 13 - Poetry in Dilution: Pater, Morris, and the Future of English

Summary

The closing phase of Pater’s 1868 review, ‘Poems by William Morris’, reappeared in 1873 as his Conclusion to The Renaissance. This chapter takes Pater’s engagement with Morris – both initially, and in these altered contexts – as a basis for thinking about his contribution to the development of English Studies. His evaluative criteria and methodology are also germane: what Pater values in Morris also envisions what he values in literature more generally. His account of ‘flux’ and perceptualism are familiar; but in the Morris review Pater is drawn more insistently to analogies with water – a fluidity expressing his aversion to walls, whether cultural or material, and a toleration of literature in dilution. Dilution is not commonly associated with literary virtues, not least because the twentieth-century re-founders of English tended to value concentration and concretion over any impression of looseness or dispersal. It is argued, however, that Pater recovers value from dilution – indeed, a dynamisation – though engagement with the language of cures associated with the then-fashionable alternative medicine of homeopathy.