Walter Pater (1839-1894), was an English critic, essayist, and humanist who argued that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose. "Art for art's sake" is a core principle of Aestheticism, the movement he helped found. Pater's exquisite writing style and bold ideas exerted a powerful influence on such writers as Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Paul Val�ry, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens and has had lasting influence on the field of art criticism.
