Autotelic stands for having,
as an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was
used by T. S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by new criticism to
distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from didactic,
philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference
to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald
MacLeish, 'A poem should not mean / But be'. A similar idea is implied in the
theory of the 'poetic function' put forward in Russian Formalism.