A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

Walter Pater (1839–1894), a leading Victorian critic associated with aestheticism, developed a style of criticism attentive to the sensuous and psychological effects of art and literature. This remark comes from his account of how modern poetry differs from earlier modes: it registers a heightened, more self-conscious responsiveness to the visible world—landscape, objects, surfaces—as if they carried emotional and intellectual meaning. Pater’s broader critical project in the 1860s–1870s was to describe the “modern” sensibility (shaped by Romanticism and later nineteenth-century thought) as more inward, reflective, and finely discriminating, and to show how that sensibility manifests in poetic technique and attention to detail.

Pater argues that modern poetry is marked by an intensified receptivity to “outward things.” The mature poetic mind does not merely notice the external world; it dwells on it, listens for its implications, and treats it as expressive—capable of suggesting moods, ideas, and states of consciousness. What earlier, “less developed” awareness might have skimmed over becomes, for the modern poet, charged with significance. The claim implies a shift from generalized description toward a more nuanced, interpretive realism: objects and scenes are rendered with patient attention because they are understood as mediating inner life. Pater thus links poetic modernity to a refined perceptual and interpretive temperament.