autotelic: having, an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1932 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. This word also has a connotation in Psychology in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's classification of personalities.

[Etymology: Greek autotelēs, from aut- + telos, meaning self + goal.]