autotelism

He revived, modified, and utilized various literary forms-the poetic tract, the ode, the longer descriptive philosophical poem, the political satire, the digressive-contemplative poem-thereby realizing one of the main goals of modern poetry: autotelism. Yet at the same time he treated poetry as a part of culture, a laboratory for producing new forms of communication, a reservoir of past achievements, a means of protecting the rights of the individual, a tool for knowing and exploring being.

But his decision to depict Winston's attraction to the object as a form of entrapment suggests that he now accepts the arguments against autotelism: the objections Macneice raised in Modern Poetry, for example, against the kind of poetic image used "purely aesthetically for the sake of the image itself" (105).

Unlike Woodmansee, Bell-Villada stresses that while Kant and Schiller made major contributions to the tradition of art for art's sake, they themselves were never interested in art's conceivable autotelism, but instead viewed the aesthetic as part-and-parcel with other values.