"There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago"
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Tate opens by pretending to grant the doctrine its clean, aloof dignity: art for art's sake is fine, he shrugs, if we actually mean it. That conditional is the knife. He’s not rescuing aestheticism so much as staging a trap for it, separating a serious claim about artistic autonomy from the genteel brand-name version that, in his view, turned into a fashionable manner and then a hollow alibi.
The jab at "the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago" is doing a lot of cultural work. Tate is writing as a high-modernist Southerner with a critic’s impatience for inherited poses. By pointing to an English scene (think late Aestheticism and its afterglow), he suggests that "art for art’s sake" had been reduced to a recognizable product: precious, self-regarding, rhetorically perfumed. Not a philosophy, a style. The distance of "forty years ago" also matters: he’s calling it dated without having to litigate names. It’s a way of dismissing an entire mood as yesterday’s cosmopolitan chic.
Subtext: Tate wants seriousness back in the room, but not the blunt sermonizing modernists were also accused of. He’s arguing that artistic purity isn’t the problem; bad faith is. If a poem claims to exist only for beauty, it had better earn that claim through form, pressure, and intelligence, not through decorative evasions. The line reads like a quip, but it’s really a demand: stop using slogans to protect mediocre work, and stop confusing a historical fad with a defensible artistic principle.
The jab at "the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago" is doing a lot of cultural work. Tate is writing as a high-modernist Southerner with a critic’s impatience for inherited poses. By pointing to an English scene (think late Aestheticism and its afterglow), he suggests that "art for art’s sake" had been reduced to a recognizable product: precious, self-regarding, rhetorically perfumed. Not a philosophy, a style. The distance of "forty years ago" also matters: he’s calling it dated without having to litigate names. It’s a way of dismissing an entire mood as yesterday’s cosmopolitan chic.
Subtext: Tate wants seriousness back in the room, but not the blunt sermonizing modernists were also accused of. He’s arguing that artistic purity isn’t the problem; bad faith is. If a poem claims to exist only for beauty, it had better earn that claim through form, pressure, and intelligence, not through decorative evasions. The line reads like a quip, but it’s really a demand: stop using slogans to protect mediocre work, and stop confusing a historical fad with a defensible artistic principle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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