The word “aesthetic” and its cognates have clung to the name of Edgar Allan Poe. A handful of his more resonant statements about poetic art have found a place within histories of “aesthetic theory,” and he has formed a permanent posthumous association with the late-nineteenth century cultural movement or mode of sensibility known as “aestheticism.” On the strength of a scattering of suggestive lines from his critical prose, posterity has assured Poe an early, in some accounts freakishly early, position in the genealogy of the various doctrines grouped together under the label “Art for Art's sake.”

The word “aesthetic” was still working its way into the English language in Poe's lifetime. It had first come into use as a technical term in Germany in 1750, in the title of A. T. Baumgarten's treatise, Aesthetica, which attempted to set out a philosophically-grounded theory of taste; it later furnished Immanuel Kant with the basic concept for an inquiry into the philosophy of art in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790).