SOURCE: “The Poetics of Pater's Prose: ‘The Child in the House,’” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Autumn, 1985, pp. 281-88.

In the following essay, Buckler uses “The Child in the House” as an example of how Pater combines recollection, insight, and form to make his prose poetic.

If one can profitably think of Arnold's key-signature poems as imaginary portraits, as I think one surely can, then the critical instruments appropriate for an exploration of how they work should, with certain obvious adjustments, be suitable for measuring the poetry they share with Pater's key-signature prose pieces. This, I suggest, is the case—that poems like “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann,” “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” and even “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gipsy,” and Empedocles on Etna have an artistic motive very similar to the artistic motive of Pater's imaginary portraits, including, besides the four published under that umbrella-title...