Aesthetics

Writing about beauty, art, poetry, gardens and taste.

29 ranked

The number is the librarian’s score, out of ten, from Claude, an AI. Readers’ scores appear beside it once five people have rated. Claude has not heard the albums: their scores come from what is documented about them.

Titles from the Open Stacks can be read here in full; the others link to where they can be found.

1 PoeticsΠερὶ ποιητικῆς Aristotle c. 335 BCE 9.5
2 The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons文心雕龍 Liu Xie c. 501–502 9.4
3 Critique of JudgmentKritik der Urteilskraft Immanuel Kant 1790 9.4
4 Nāṭyaśāstraनाट्यशास्त्र Bharata Muni (traditional) 0 9.1
5 On the SublimeΠερὶ ὕψους Longinus (author unknown) 1st century CE 9.0
6 My Mind Has a Place to Lodge: Liu Xie's Afterword to The Literary Mind文心雕龍·序志 Liu Xie c. 501 9.0
7 Poetic Remarks in the Human World人間詞話 Wang Guowei 1908–1909 9.0
8 Poetic Remarks in the Human World (selection)人間詞話（選） Wang Guowei 1908 9.0
9 A Discourse on Literature典論·論文 Cao Pi c. 218 8.9
10 Lectures on AestheticsVorlesungen über die Ästhetik G. W. F. Hegel 1835 8.9
11 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and PoetryLaokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1766 8.8
12 The Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica)Ars Poetica Horace c. 19 BCE 8.7
13 Grades of Poets (Shipin)詩品 Zhong Rong 515 8.7
14 The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry二十四詩品 Sikong Tu (attributed) 900 8.6
15 Canglang's Remarks on Poetry滄浪詩話 Yan Yu 1230 8.6
16 Six Quatrains Written in Jest戲爲六絕句 Du Fu c. 761 8.5
17 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke 1757 8.5
18 The Common Reader, and How It Strikes a ContemporaryThe Common Reader; How It Strikes a Contemporary Virginia Woolf 1925 8.5
19 In Praise of Shadows陰翳礼讃 Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 1933 8.5
20 The Story of Art E. H. Gombrich 1950 8.5
21 The Classic of Tea茶經 Lu Yu c. 760–780 8.4
22 Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling閒情偶寄 Li Yu 1671 8.3
23 Modern Painters John Ruskin 1843 8.2
24 The Book of Tea Okakura Kakuzō 1906 8.1
25 Intentions Oscar Wilde 1891 8.0
26 Against Interpretation and Other EssaysAgainst Interpretation Susan Sontag 1966 8.0
27 A Stroll Through Aesthetics美学散步 Zong Baihua 1981 8.0
28 Ways of Seeing John Berger 1972 7.9
29 What Is Art?Что такое искусство? Leo Tolstoy 1897 7.8