Oscar Wilde - Poetry Foundation

4/26/2017 Oscar Wilde | Poetry Foundation
Skip to Main Content
Poetry Foundation Poetry Foundation
Navigation
About Us
Visit
Contact Us
Newsletters
Give
Poems
& Poets
Browse Poems
Browse Poets
Seasonal Poems
Features
Articles
Audio & Podcasts
Video
Harriet: News & Community
Resources
Learning Lab
Children's Poetry
Young People's Poet Laureate
POETRY Mobile App
Programs & Initiatives
Foundation Events
Gallery Exhibitions
Foundation Awards
Poetry Foundation Library
Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Media Partnerships
Poetry Out Loud
Poetry Magazine
April 2017 Les Murray, Arthur Sze, S.J. Fowler, George Bowering, Sumita Chakraborty, Danielle
Chapman, Jeffrey Yang, David Tomas Martinez, Rae Armantrout, Marianne Boruch, CAConrad,
Kazim Ali, Alison C. Rollins, Ange Mlinko, James Longenbach, Momina Mela, and many others.
Table of Contents
Browse All Issues Back to 1912
Subscribe to Poetry Magazine
Submissions & Letters to the Editor
Advertise with Us
Search the Site Search poems, poets, videos …
Search
1. Home
2. Poems & Poets
3. Browse Poets
4. Oscar Wilde
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poemsandpoets/poets/detail/oscarwilde 1/18
Biography
Poems, Articles & More
Discover this author’s context.
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Email
Share
Print
Oscar Wilde
Poet Details
1854–1900
No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of
Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable
contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which
— The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic theater. His only novel, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety. This book gives a
particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems
early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is
The Ballad of Reading Gaol. On a curious but productive tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two
volumes of fairy tales that are delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and
artistic concerns. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in
Intentions (1891), and his long soulsearching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, written in 1897 from
Reading Gaol.
Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who believed that style—in life as
well as art—was of utmost importance. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising
since, as H. Montgomery Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, his mother was a poet and Irish
revolutionary who published under the name "Speranza," and his father a successful eye and ear surgeon in
Dublin and "author of a work which remained the standard textbook on aural surgery for many years." Though
his background was literary and professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and,
according to Hyde, "insisted on dressing him in girl's clothes." Dr. William Wilde was a notorious philanderer,
and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son's famous trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case
disclosed his sexual indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.
Oscar Wilde was a brilliant student in college, first at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Berkeley Gold
Medal for Greek, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his poem "Ravenna" captured the prestigious
Newdigate Prize in 1878. It was at Oxford that Wilde came under the influences of John Ruskin, a critic, writer,
and professor, and Walter Pater, a critic and essayist whose Studies in the History of The Renaissance
legitimized Wilde's nascent ideas on art and individualism.
After taking his B.A. degree at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two years later published his first
book, Poems. Most of the poems in this volume had been previously published in various Irish periodicals. The
collection met with mixed reviews, less favorable in England than in America. Punch was at the vanguard of the
criticism, leveling what was to become a common charge against Wilde: "Mr. Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is
not original. This is a volume of echoes, it is Swinburne and water." Hesketh Pearson recorded the words of
Oliver Elton, who spoke against the acceptance of the volume as a gift to the Oxford Union, the famous debating
society: "It is not that these poems are thin—and they are thin, it is not that they are this or that—they are all
this or that; it is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of betterknown
and more deservedly reputed authors. They are in fact by William Shakespeare, by Philip Sidney, by John
Donne, by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne, and by sixty more." While Elton
exaggerated the case, it is clear that most of the collection's poems are highly derivative.
Some of these early poems—"Panthea," for example—are, as one would expect from a young aesthete, poems
that extol pleasure and sensation: "to feel is better than to know." Epifanio San Juan, in The Art of Oscar Wilde,
summed up the argument of "Panthea": "Let us live pleasurably since the gods are indifferent." But other poems
—"Helas"and "E Tenebris," for example—strike a contrary note of moral awareness and even remorse. In "E
Tenebris" the poet states: "And well I know my soul in Hell must lie/If I this night before God's throne should
stand." As Philip Cohen noted in The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, this moral strain is paradoxically woven
throughout the fabric of Wilde's work, despite his seemingly definitive statements to the contrary, such as in the
preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style." This moralism and remorse receive their fullest expression in the letter from
jail, De Profundis. Perhaps the best poems of the 1881 volume are those titled "Impressions," in which "Wilde
attains sharpness and total complexity in the depiction of scenes," San Juan remarked. "Colors, tactile
sensations, and a weird 'animistic' vibration characterize physical movements, as in 'Impressions du Matin.'"
Among Wilde's most famous poems is "The Sphinx." As Hyde reported, the work was begun at Oxford,
substantially composed in Paris in 1883, and repeatedly polished until its publication in 1894. This most exotic
of all Wilde's poems begins with the ravenlike sphinx planted in the corner of the poet's room and proceeds
through a series of imagined scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a lover.
Reviewers criticized the work for being sensational and artificial, but later critics have found some notable
qualities; in San Juan's words, "Among all Wilde's poems, 'The Sphinx' alone betrays a masculine energy that
enlivens gorgeous landscape, fusing religion, iconology, and historical facts within the current of meditation and
monologue."
Between the publication of Poems in 1881 and his next significant book in 1888, Wilde went on a lecture tour of
America, was married to Constance Lloyd, fathered two sons, became editor of a fashionable magazine,
Woman's World, and continued to build his reputation as the most soughtafter dinner guest in the British Isles.
Frances Winwar, in Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties, described this social aspect of his fame: "His life from
now on assumed an air of arrogance. He would do nothing in moderation—except work. But then, his real work
was accomplished when he talked. Before a group of listeners, especially if they were young and handsome and
titled, he outdid himself. In the spark of their admiration his mind quickened. Epigram followed epigram, one
more dazzling, more preposterous than the other, yet always, like the incandescent core of the firework, with a
burning truth at the heart." In addition to his epigrams, Wilde's table talk frequently consisted of his original
fairy tales; they were later published in two volumes, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and The House of
Pomegranates.
That Wilde told these stories at dinner parties before they were published illustrates an unusual fact about their
intended audience: they were not composed for children. A few of the stories in the first volume, particularly
"The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant," continually find their way into anthologies of fairy tales for
children, but most of the book's nine tales do not appeal to young people. This is particularly true of the stories
in The House of Pomegranates, which generally have more elaborate plots and a more mannered style than do
those in The Happy Prince and Other Tales. When asked if the tales of the second volume were intended for
children, Wilde replied in a typically flippant way: "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child
as I did of pleasing the British public." The first volume received generally favorable reviews and, more
importantly for Wilde, his mentor Walter Pater wrote him from Oxford to express his approval: "I am confined
to my room with gout, but have been consoling myself with 'The Happy Prince,' and feel it would he ungrateful
not to send a line to tell you how delightful I have found him and his companions. I hardly know whether to
admire more the wise wit of 'The Remarkable Rocket' or the beauty and tenderness of 'The Selfish Giant': the
latter is perfect in its kind."
latter is perfect in its kind."
Wilde's fairy tales deserve more notice than they have generally received. A few of them are minor prose
masterpieces, most notably "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," and "The
Fisherman and His Soul." But they should be taken seriously for another reason as well: they embody some of
the conflicts and themes that run throughout Wilde's work. "The Happy Prince" stresses the importance of
giving of oneself, even of making the ultimate sacrifice, in order to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. This
message foreshadows some of Wilde's ideas in his later work The Soul of Man under Socialism. "The
Nightingale and the Rose" deals in a similar way with giving, but here the emphasis is on the need to sacrifice
for love. Wilde's love of beauty and his conception of its fleeting quality find expression in this story of a
nightingale who sacrifices its life to produce the perfect rose. In the story's final satirical twist the beautiful rose
is rejected because it does not match the color of a young girl's dress. In Oscar Wilde, Robert K. Miller declared
that this ironic turn reveals Wilde's "ambivalence toward love" that is "related to his ambivalence about women."
In "The Selfish Giant" the title character overcomes his selfishness toward children and thus serves as an
allegory of Christian redemption. The imaginative sympathy of the giant is similar to that which Wilde ascribes
to Christ in his later work, De Profundis. "The Fisherman and His Soul," from the second volume, is the most
complex of Wilde's fairy tales; it was described by John A. Quintus in Virginia Quarterly Review as "another
treatment of the doppelgänger theme in which the body and the soul are separated, as they are in The Picture of
Dorian Gray." In a reversal of the usual situation in which the body corrupts the soul, the Fisherman's soul—
which the Fisherman has dispensed with so that he can love a mermaid—tempts his body to sin and through the
resultant suffering body and soul are reunited.
Both Quintus and Miller emphasized Wilde's moral point of view in these stories. This element has already been
seen in some of the early poems, and it reappears in Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Quintus was
careful to point out, however, that "Wilde's tales are not . . . designed to encourage faith or advocate
Christianity." As much as they sometimes seem to be moral exempla, his tales also have their uncertainties: love
is complex, and sometimes unrequited; error is not always recognized; sin, in "The Fisherman and His Soul," is
the means by which harmony is achieved—Wilde's version of the felix culpa, the fortunate fall.
In July of 1889 Wilde gave up the editorship of Women's World and settled down to write The Picture of Dorian
Gray. This is Wilde's only novel, a blend of French decadence and English gothicism. It is filled with genuinely
witty dialogue and beautiful descriptive passages, while sometimes descending to the level of slick melodrama
and ponderous theorizing. The novel details the life of a hedonistic aristocrat, Dorian Gray. When Dorian sees
the portrait that Basil Hallward paints of him, he wishes he could change places with his likeness, remain always
young and beautiful, and allow the portrait to bear the effects of time—and, as it turns out, the effects of sin. As
in the world of the fairy tale, the wish is granted, but at a terrible price.
At the time he was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde became friendly with Robert ("Robbie") Ross,
whom he had first met in 1886 at Oxford and who later served as Wilde's literary executor after faithfully
standing by him through Wilde's trials and the horrors of Wilde's two years in prison. H. Montgomery Hyde, in
Oscar Wilde: A Biography, cited "strong grounds for believing that it was with [Ross] that Wilde first
deliberately experimented in homosexual practices." Ross kept Wilde apprised of all the literary gossip, and
when Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, Ross wrote the following to him: "Even
in the precincts of the Savile nothing but praise of Dorian Gray, though of course it is said to be very dangerous.
I heard a clergyman extolling it, he only regretted some of the sentiments . . . as apt to lead people astray." Most
of the reviews of the novel were hostile because of the book's supposed perversity and immorality. A
particularly scathing attack in The Scots Observer made a veiled reference to Wilde's homosexuality and
suggested he take up tailoring or some other "decent" trade. For the novel's hardcover edition, published the
following year, Wilde made some changes, most important of which was the addition of six chapters and the
famous epigrammatic preface. Perhaps surprisingly, the reviews this time were more favorable. Walter Pater
praised the book highly, and, as Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, Irish poet and dramatist William
Butler Yeats wrote that "Dorian Gray, with all its faults, is a wonderful book."
Countering charges that the novel is immoral—it is certainly replete with descriptions of a dissolute lifestyle—
Wilde argued that on the contrary "there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray, a moral which the prurient will not 4/18
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poemsandpoets/poets/detail/oscarwilde
Wilde argued that on the contrary "there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray, a moral which the prurient will not
be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy." The moral allegory is perhaps
too evident even to what Wilde would have called a philistine audience. Joyce Carol Oates in Critical Inquiry
described the novel as a "parable of the fall" and identified Dorian's sin in his practice of involving others,
"without any emotion, . . . in his life's drama, simply as a method of procuring extraordinary sensations." Miller
struck a similar note, stating that "Dorian's misfortune is not that he has lived deeply and well but that he loses
the capacity to feel and with it the capacity to merge his life with others. His life becomes a series of onenight
stands, each encounter briefer than the last." This view led Miller to suggest that, for Wilde, "art, like
experience, is good only so long as it contributes to selfdevelopment."
This theme of selfdevelopment is central to the book, and each character's failure to develop illustrates the real
tragedy of the novel. The painter Basil Hallward, for all his goodness, sublimates his true feelings in the
beautiful portrait. Lord Henry Wotton, for all his theories about the importance of indiscriminate experience,
does not act. And Dorian Gray, whose actions with others lead him only to the point of prizing things such as
tapestries, jewels, and vestments, unconvincingly tries to redeem himself with the village girl Hetty, but
succeeds only in ending his life in a melodramatic fashion.
"In spite of its many weaknesses," asserted Edouard Roditi in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Guidebook, "The Picture
of Dorian Gray yet remains, in many respects, a great novel. Though hastily written and clumsily constructed, it
manages to haunt many readers with vivid memories of its visionary descriptions." Epifanio San Juan preferred
to assess the book's importance in terms of its contribution to the development of the novel: "In setting a
portrait, a work of art, at the center of the action, Wilde effects the interplay of natural perception and moral
judgment in the novel. From the reader's viewpoint, the picture suggests the treatment of angle and distance—
the ways of telling and showing—which make up the perennial issues of the aesthetics and criticism of fiction."
While The Picture of Dorian Gray has an assured place as a serious work of art and a document of fin de siècle
aestheticism, it did not gain for its author a reputation as a great novelist. It is rather because of his dramas that
Wilde's reputation has remained most secure. Louis Kronenberger, in The Thread of Laughter, mentioned Wilde
together with the great eighteenthcentury dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan: "The brilliant stage comedy
that glittered briefly in Sheridan and then remained dormant, if not dead, for over a hundred years is in some
measure brought back to life with Oscar Wilde." Wilde's strengths were certainly suited to the theater; no
medium better showcases his irrepressible wit, his penchant for paradox, and his sardonic views on manners and
morals.
Though Wilde wrote nine plays in all between 1879 and 1894, his fame as a dramatist rests entirely on four
comedies— Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being
Earnest—and the strange and infamous Salomé. Written first, Salomé was composed in Paris in 1891 but not
performed in England until after Wilde's death. Britain's Lord Chamberlain, responsible for licensing stage
performances, banned the play on the technical grounds that it portrayed biblical characters, which was
forbidden since the days of the Protestant Reformation. The play no doubt offended on other grounds as well,
such as those expressed by a critic in the London Times in 1893: "It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity,
morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse
of sacred."
Salomé is vastly different from Wilde's society comedies which were rapidly to follow in the early 1890s. This
exotic oneact play has more the atmosphere of the earlier poem The Sphinx in its variations on the themes of
obsession, lust, incest, and violence. Salomé moves forward largely on the basis of ritualistic repetition and a
unifying pattern of imagery. Richard Ellmann, in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, described this
unity as "the extreme concentration upon a single episode which is like an image, with a synchronized moon
changing color from pale to bloodred in keeping with the action, and an atmosphere of frenzy framed in exotic
chill." Salomé is Wilde's most completely decadent work. While the play exhibits a few traces of a moral point
of view—Jokanaan's rejection of Salomé and Herod's fearful conscience at the end—the dominant impression is
one of macabre beauty, and the climax is reached when Salomé's kisses the bitter lips of Jokanaan's severed
head. This impression was undercut for critic Alan Bird, who, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde, contended that even
in this play Wilde's wit shows through: "Yet the reader (or audience) can never escape the uncomfortable
in this play Wilde's wit shows through: "Yet the reader (or audience) can never escape the uncomfortable
sensation that the author is actually parodying the action, the words, the characters, the whole ensemble of the
drama. This suspicion of parody, however faint, produces an intentional distancing, a deliberate alienation,
which far from allowing us to dismiss the drama seems to increase the total effect of decadence."
Beginning with the society comedy Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde finally found his métier. This play and his
last, The Importance of Being Earnest, reveal Wilde at the height of his powers, dealing in a sure way with those
things he knew and did best—portraying the upper crust of society, creating characters who could mouth his
brilliant epigrams and paradoxes in amusing, if conventional, plots. These plays use much of the typical material
of the comedy of manners: mistaken identities, sexual indiscretions, cases of unknown parentage, and social
snobbery. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband also deal, in varying
degrees of seriousness, with Wilde's favorite themes of the loss of innocence and the assertion of individuality.
Lady Windermere's Fan was originally produced by the actormanager George Alexander before a thoroughly
appreciative audience. It ran for 156 performances and solidified Wilde's position in the fashionable society he
so much aspired to. He retained this exalted status for only three years before his trial for homosexuality made
him a convict and a social outcast. But while his fame lasted Wilde enjoyed it with his usual flair. When the
firstnight audience at Lady Windermere's Fan called him to the stage after the final curtain, he smugly offered
to those present: "The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has
been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you
think almost as highly of the play as I do myself." On the whole, the drama critics of the day did not agree with
the audience, but their negative reviews did not deter people from flocking to subsequent performances.
Lady Windermere's Fan is a story about a woman with a past. Mrs. Erlynne, the fallen woman who years ago
left her husband and her daughter—now Lady Windermere—reappears and tries to regain a social position.
Ironically it is the fallen woman who turns out to be the "good woman" of the subtitle ("A Play about a Good
Woman"), and the good woman of the first act, Lady Windermere, is forced to undergo a painful realization that
things are not always what they appear to be. Arthur Ganz observed in British Victorian Literature that Lady
Windermere "learns that a single act is not a final indicator of character and that a sinner may be a very noble
person indeed." This recognition, growing even as it does from a rather conventional return of a relative, adds a
note of seriousness to a play that probably could have succeeded on its wit alone. Lines such as "Why, I have
met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with
good women. To know them is a middle class education" probably flattered the upper class audience and
confirmed the suspicions of the middle class that this is the way dandies spoke in their drawing rooms and clubs.
Robert Keith Miller complained that the play suffers from the juxtaposition of this verbal wit with the serious
nature of the plot and maintained, "The union of Mrs. Erlynne with Lord Augustus, in the last fifty lines of the
play, strikes one as a rather desperate attempt to relieve the tension of the last several acts in order to end on a
light note."
While publicly Wilde was enjoying the success of Lady Windermere's Fan, in his private life the author was
beginning a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde had been introduced to "Bosie" Douglas,
the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, by the poet Lionel Johnson. As Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A
Biography,Douglas immediately fell under the spell of Wilde's charming conversation. In July of 1893 Wilde
moved in with Douglas at The Cottage, GoringonThames, ostensibly so that they could work together.
A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband followed quickly on the success of Lady Windermere's Fan
and received similar acclaim from the audiences and similar disdain from the critics. Again in these plays Wilde
presents characters with "pasts"—Lady Arbuthnot, the "Woman," and Sir Robert Chiltern, the "Husband." Both
have their counterparts in puritanical characters that clearly resemble Lady Windermere. In both of these plays,
Miller noted, "we find Wilde condemning absolutes and pleading for tolerance in a world that is apt to be harsh."
Neither of these plays is as carefully structured as Lady Windermere's Fan. Agreeing with Speranza, Wilde's
mother, that the plays needed "more plot," Alan Bird declared that in A Woman of No Importance "the plot is
weak, and is, in fact, practically nonexistent. The incident, such as it is, of a woman meeting a former lover and
being involved in a tugofwar over their child does not offer sufficient action or opportunity for development to
fill four acts."
fill four acts."
The culmination of Wilde's dramatic art is The Importance of Being Earnest. Hyde reported that Allan
Aynesworth, who played Algernon in the first performance, recalled many years later: "In my fiftythree years of
acting I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest. The audience
rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again." This time the critics were highly favorable in their reviews.
Superficially, at least, The Importance of Being Earnest contains many of the same elements as the earlier plays.
Once again there are the question of parentage, a matter of mistaken identity, and a character who has been
living a lie for years. But, as Louis Kronenberger observed, "the only difference is that here nothing can seem
bogus because nothing pretendstobereal; nothing can offend our feelings because nothing can affect them."
What Arthur Ganz identified in the earlier plays as the conflict between the philistine world and the dandyish
world no longer exists in this play, because the philistine world has been replaced by a world of almost pure
farce.
The plot centers on two pairs of lovers—Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, and Algernon Moncrieff and
Cecily Cardew. Each of the men leads a double life: Jack, who lives in the country with his ward Cecily, has
invented an alter ego named Ernest for his life in town; Algernon has done similarly with his imaginary invalid
friend Bunbury, who lives in the country. When the audience shortly learns that each of the young women
absurdly wishes to marry a man named Ernest, the stage is set for farcical twists and turns. Over almost all the
action presides Lady Bracknell, a woman with wit to spare and a discerning judgment regarding the credentials
requisite for the proper marriage. When Jack and Algernon turn out to be brothers in the same respectable family
as Lady Bracknell, the play can end happily and absurdly with the two marriages.
George Woodcock, who in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde examined at length the social ideas in Wilde's other
comedies, found "no explicit social theme" in The Importance of Being Earnest. In Papers on Language and
Literature, Dennis Spininger concurred, explaining that Wilde "uses the tools of the satirist without wanting to
cure the follies and ills he criticizes." Although Kate Matlock posited in Journal of Irish Literature that Wilde
makes an affirmation at the end of the play in that it "asserts that marriage is a positive social element which
reins in deceptive and potentially corrupt bachelor tendencies," such critics as Spininger and Morris Freedman
have moved away from such a conventional view of the comedy as a reassertion of order and toward a
perception of the play as anticipating the drama of the absurd. Perhaps Freedman was correct when in The Moral
Impulse he described the play as "an account of the search of several young persons for meaning in a society
extraordinarily reluctant, even impotent, to assign importance to anything except the superficial." However, the
second part of this statement is much easier to accept than the first part, because the young people participate in
this farcical society, and they live by its rules—or break them in acceptable ways. If an element of seriousness
can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker called "a pseudo
irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems."
Wilde's dramatic career, and indeed his entire writing career, with the exception of De Profundis and The Ballad
of Reading Gaol, came to a end following the enormously successful Importance of Being Earnest. This play
and An Ideal Husband played concurrently in London in 1895 until Wilde's arrest and trial. The Importance of
Being Earnest subsequently ran for a month with the author's name removed from the playbills and the program;
An Ideal Husband was cancelled almost immediately.
During his imprisonment Wilde continued to write as an essayist. He had been writing critical essays since 1879,
when he arrived in London from Oxford and began to write on art for various London periodicals. In 1882 he
lectured in America, and these lectures were published after his death by his bibliographer Stuart Mason. His
most important critical essays were "The Decay of Lying," "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," "The Critic as Artist," and
"The Truth of Masks," first published in Intentions; "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," which first appeared in
the Fortnightly Review in 1891; and De Profundis, a long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison and
published in 1905. Richard Ellman, in his introduction to The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde,
placed him at the end of a clear progression of English critics from Matthew Arnold to Ruskin to Pater. Wilde
clearly had Arnold in mind in "The Critic as Artist," when he turned upside down his predecessor's famous
dictum that the function of criticism is to see the object as it really is: Wilde would have it that "the aim of the
critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not." This is no mere playing with paradox for Wilde, because this7/18
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poemsandpoets/poets/detail/oscarwilde
critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not." This is no mere playing with paradox for Wilde, because this
whole essay strives to show that criticism is creative, that the critic uses the work of art as a jumpingoff place
for his own imaginative activity. The higher the imagination soars, both from the work of art and from reality,
the better the criticism. Just as the critic in this sense can be superior to the artist, so the artist is superior to the
man of action. The man of action is the least imaginative because action is "a base concession to fact."
"Imaginative freedom is the key element in Wilde's criticism. In "The Decay of Lying" he argues that lying is a
requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The problem with the novel in England, Wilde
claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works: "they find life
crude, and leave it raw." In this essay Wilde makes his seemingly outrageous statement that "life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates life." Though perhaps overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways
in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet
and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other earlier English romantics.
The Soul of Man under Socialism, though not collected in Intentions, was published in the same year, 1891.
Wilde's society friends must have been amused at his advocacy of socialism, but the conclusions of this essay
are consistent with those of the other essays—if we accept his premises about socialism. Wilde advocates a
nonauthoritarian socialism under which the individual would be freed from either the burden of poverty or the
burdens of greed and guilt. As Michael Helfand and Philip Smith stated in Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, "Wilde formulated a nonauthoritarian socialist theory which encouraged aesthetic activity, analogous
to sexual selection, and reduced competition (and thus natural selection), as the way of achieving continuous
cultural and social improvement." To Wilde's previous emphasis on imagination he now brings an emphasis on
individualism, both of which, he speculates, would flourish under socialism.
Wilde's last important essay was written during his imprisonment. Events leading up to Wilde's incarceration
began when Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, tried unsuccessfully to end the
relationship between his son and Wilde. Frustrated by his lack of success, he went to Wilde's club and left his
card, which was inscribed "To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic ]." Against all advice, in early 1895
Wilde decided to sue Queensberry for libel. Wilde lost the case, and as a result of the testimony against him at
the trial, he was arrested and tried for homosexuality. Since the jury could not agree on a verdict, Wilde was
tried a second time and ultimately convicted. The record of these trials, which was published by H. Montgomery
Hyde in 1948 as Trials of Oscar Wilde, makes fascinating reading, revealing as it does the vanity of Wilde, the
eccentricities of Queensbury, and exultation of the British public at the verdict. Wilde was sentenced in May,
1895, to two years of hard labor, most of which was spent at Reading Gaol.
At Reading Gaol, toward the end of his term, Wilde wrote the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that has come
to be called De Profundis. A heavily edited version of this letter was published in 1905; the entire work did not
appear until Rupert HartDavis's complete edition of Wilde's letters was published in 1962. As a work of art, De
Profundis suffers from a divided purpose caused in part by the fact that there is more than one audience. From
the beginning Wilde intended the letter to be read by more people than Douglas alone. At the end of the work he
expressed its weaknesses as well as anyone later appraising De Profundis has: "How far I am away from the true
temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures
to realize those aspirations shows you quite clearly." The scorn and bitterness come early in the letter, where he
excoriates Douglas for his lack of imagination and soul. Then Wilde reverses his position and accepts any blame
for the outcome of events. But the vehemence of the early denunciation renders hollow a finely cried statement
like the following: "To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own
experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul." Though on the
whole it is beautifully written, the letter suffers from this uncertain tone and, as George Woodcock noted,
presents Wilde's sentimentality at "its most irritating depth in De Profundis."
Nevertheless, the work contains passages of real power, such as those in which Wilde describes life in prison
and the ridicule he was subjected to during his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading. And Wilde reasserts the
most important critical principles of the earlier essays: the importance of individualism, imagination, self
expression, and selfdevelopment. In De Profundis, Christ becomes the archetype of the artist, "the most
supreme of individualists."
supreme of individualists."
Wilde's last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was written shortly after his release from prison in 1897. Hyde
recorded in The Annotated Oscar Wilde that Yeats called it "a great or almost great poem," but the fact that he
chose only thirtyeight of the poem's 109 stanzas for publication in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse suggests
his awareness of the work's diffuseness. The poem appeared in 1898 without Wilde's name but with the
identification "C.3.3.," his cell number at Reading Gaol. The ballad tells a very moving story of a man
condemned to death for the murder of his young wife and records the horror of his fellow prisoners as they
watch him go through his last days. Though the poem has much of the realism that Wilde always abhorred, it
transcends nineteenthcentury prison life in its handling of the themes of suffering, isolation, and collective guilt
("Yet each man kills the thing he loves"). The poem is the most successful of Wilde's nondramatic works
primarily because, as Robert Keith Miller said, Wilde himself is "no longer the center of attention." The speaker
is a prisoner, but the focus is first on the condemned man and then on all of the prisoners as a group.
Similarly, Wilde eluded attention after his prison release. He wandered Europe for three and a half years under
an assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, and died bankrupt in a Paris hotel on November 30, 1900.
"From Wilde's death until the late 1940s, critics generally focused on his biography, choosing to discuss the man
rather than his writings," reported Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Debra Boyd. Even then, Wilde
was "relegated to being a minor fixture in the Victorian pantheon of writers, one admired mainly for The
Importance of Being Earnest or considered a representative of Aestheticism or the Decadent movement." But in
more recent decades, Boyd continued, the writer's reputation has risen. "Additional biographical and textual
materials have been made available," affording critics and scholars an enhanced view of Wilde's sense of his
own works. "In addition," said Boyd, "poststructuralist criticism and gay studies have provided scholars with
varied theoretical frameworks from which to examine Wilde's works."
Boyd pointed to a handful of scholars, including Jonathan Dollimore and Richard Dellamora, who have
subsequently placed Wilde "in the forefront of writers who examine the sexual and political dimensions of art."
Boyd argues that even in such a favorable light, scholars tend to gravitate toward the author's plays and longer
fiction like Dorian Gray, to the neglect of Wilde's shorter pieces. "More attention must be paid to his short
fiction," she maintained. "In this age of literary theory, few writers can articulate as clearly as Wilde did for the
theoretical bases for their works and then actually practice what they preach. Wilde's stories show that he was
able to merge theory and practice, creating works of art that stand up well to critical scrutiny." The author has
been the subject of many biographies, both in book and film version, notably Richard Ellmann's 1988 work,
Oscar Wilde, and the dramatic film Wilde, released in the late 1990s.
Just as Wilde the playwright and poet established his place in the literary canon, so Wilde the correspondent has
been the object of critical examination as well. Several volumes of the author's letters have been published,
including The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, coedited by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, and published
in 2000. In his introduction, Holland describes coming across the full texts of letters previously published only
in fragments. In his grandson's view, the missives show another side to Wilde, beyond the creator of social
comedies and poems. With these letters, maintained Holland, readers must reinterpret the author as "a hard
working professional writer, deeply interested by the issues of his day and carrying in his intellectual baggage
something that we all to frequently overlook, a quite extraordinary classical, literary and philosophical
education."
Bibliography
POETRY
Newdigate Prize Poem: Ravenna, Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 26, 1878, T. Shrimpton & Son
(Oxford, England), 1878.
Poems (includes "Helas," "E Tenebris," "Panthea,"and "Impressions"), Roberts Brothers (Boston, MA),
1881.
The Sphinx, illustrations by Charles Ricketts, Copeland & Day (Boston, MA), 1894.
(Early editions under pseudonym C.3.3., Wilde's prison number) The Ballad of Reading Gaol, L. Smithers
(London, England), 1896, reprinted, Woodstock Books (New York, NY), 1995, with wood engravings by
Garrick Palmer, Trafalger Square (North Pomfret, VT), 1998.
The Harlot's House (first published in The Dramatic Review, April 11, 1885), illustrations by Althea
Gyles, Mathurin Press/ L. Smithers (London, England), 1904.
Poems in Prose (first published in Fortnightly Review,July, 1894; contains "The Artist," "The Doer of
Good," "The Disciple," "The Master," "The House of Judgment," and "The Teacher of Wisdom"),
privately printed, 1905, revised edition published as Prose Poems, illustrations by Margaret McCord,
Crannog Press (Belfast, Ireland), 1973.
Pan, a Double Villanelle, and Desespoir, a Sonnet, J. W. Luce & Co. (Boston, MA), 1909.
Remorse: A Study in Saffron, notes by Majl Ewing, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los
Angeles, CA), 1961.
Serenade, illustrations by Rigby Graham, privately printed, 1962.
Some Early Poems and Fragments, privately printed, 1974.
PLAYS
Vera; or, The Nihilists (first produced in New York, NY, at Union Square Theatre, August 20, 1883),
privately printed, 1880, Classic Books (New York, NY), 2000.
Guido Ferranti: A Tragedy of the XVI Century, first produced in New York, NY, at Broadway Theatre,
January 26, 1891.
Lady Windermere's Fan (first produced in London, England, at St. James's Theater, February 20, 1893),
Matthews & Lane, Bodley Head (London, England), 1893.
A Woman of No Importance (first produced in London, England, at Haymarket Theatre, April 19, 1893),
Lane, Bodley Head (London, England), 1894.
An Ideal Husband (first produced in London, England at Haymarket Theatre, January 3, 1895), Smithers
(London, England), 1899, Dover (Mineola, NY), 2001.
The Importance of Being Earnest (first produced in London, England, at St. James's Theatre, February 14,
1895), Smithers (London, England), 1899, Dover (Mineola, NY), 1991.
Salomé (first produced in London, England, at Bijou Theatre, May 10, 1905), first published in French as
Salomé: drame en un act, Librarie de l'Art Independent (Paris, France), 1893, English translation by
Alfred Douglas published as Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, Copeland & Day (Boston, MA), 1894,
reprinted, Dover (Mineola, NY), 1967.
A Florentine Tragedy (first produced in London, England, at King's Hall, June 10, 1906), opening scene
by T. Sturge Moore, Luce (Boston, MA), 1908.
For Love of the King: A Burmese Masque, Methuen (London, England), 1922.
FICTION
The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Roberts (Boston, MA), 1888, Everyman's Library (New York, NY),
1995.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel), Ward, Lock (New York, NY), 1891, reprinted, Modern Library (New
York, NY), 1998.
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1891, reprinted, Travelman
Publishing (London, England), 2000.
A House of Pomegranates, Osgood, McIlvain (London, England), 1891, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY),
1892, reprinted, Blue Unicorn Editions (Kensington, CA), 1998.
The Portrait of Mr. W. H., Mosher (Portland, ME), 1901, edited version by Vyvyan Holland, Methuen
(London, England), 1948.
The Devoted Friend, Mage (Washington, DC), 1987.
The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, illustrated by Isabelle Brent, Holt (New York, NY), 1993.
The Fisherman and His Soul and Other Fairy Tales, 1888, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1998.
The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories, Dover (Mineola, NY), 2001.
NONFICTION; SINGLE VOLUMES
Intentions (critical essays), Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1891, reprinted, Classic Books (New York,
NY), 2002.
The Soul of Man, privately printed, 1895, published as The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1904, reprinted,
Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company (Chicago, IL), 1990.
De Profundis, Putnam (New York, NY), 1905, published with The Ballad of Reading Gaol, notes by
Rupert HartDavis, additional material by W. H. Auden, Avon Books (New York, NY), 1964, preface by
Richard Ellman, Modern Library Classics (New York, NY), 2000.
Impressions of America, edited by Stuart Mason, Keystone Press (Sunderland, England), 1906.
Decorative Art in America: A Lecture Together with Letters, Reviews, and Interviews, edited by R. B.
Glaenzer, Brentano's (New York, NY), 1906.
The Suppressed Portion of "De Profundis," Reynolds (New York, NY), 1913.
A Critic in Pall Mall, Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies, Methuen (London, England), 1919.
NONFICTION; OMNIBUS VOLUMES
Oscariana: Epigrams (excerpts), compiled by wife, Constance Mary Lloyd Wilde, privately printed,
1895, revised and enlarged edition, Arthur L. Humphreys (London, England), 1912.
Essays, Criticisms, and Reviews (collection of editorials first published in Woman's World, November,
1887, to June, 1889; contains "A Fascinating Book," "A Note on Some Modern Poets," "Some Literary
Notes," and "Literary and Other Notes"), privately printed, 1901.
Sebastian Melmoth (includes epigrams and aphorisms, excerpted, and The Soul of Man under Socialism),
Arthur L. Humphreys (London, England), 1904.
Epigrams and Aphorisms (excerpts), introduction by George Henry Sargent, J. W. Luce & Co. (Boston,
MA), 1905.
The Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, selected and introduced by Temple Scott, Brentano's (New York, NY), 1906.
Great Thoughts from Oscar Wilde, selected by Stuart Mason, Dodge Publishing Co. (New York, NY),
1912.
Aphorisms of Oscar Wilde (contains "On Men and Women," "On Civilisation," "On Art, On Vices,
Virtues, and Emotions," and "On Everything"), selected and arranged by G. N. Sutton, Methuen (London,
England), c. 1914.
The Essays of Oscar Wilde, Albert & Charles Boni (New York, NY), 1935.
Essays, edited and introduced by Hesketh Pearson, Methuen (London, England), 1950, published as The
Soul of Man under Socialism and Other Essays, introduction by Philip Rieff, Harper (New York, NY),
1970.
Epigrams: An Anthology, compiled by Alvin Redman, introduction by Vyvyan Hollad, A. Redman
(London, England), 1952, Day (New York, NY), 1954, published as The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde,
Dover (Mineola, NY), 1959.
Wit and Wisdom, compiled by Cecil Hewetson, Duckworth (London, England), 1960, published as Wit
and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, Philosophical Library (New York, NY), 1967.
Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, edited by Stanley Weintraub, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln,
NE), 1968.
The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann, Random House (New
York, NY), 1969.
The Wit of Oscar Wilde, compiled by Sean McCann, Frewin (London, England), 1969.
Witticisms of Oscar Wilde, compiled by Derek Stanford, John Baker (London, England), 1971.
Wilde Things: The Delicious and Malicious Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley,
Attic Press (Greenwood, SC), 1972.
I Can Resist Everything except Temptation: And Other Quotations from Oscar Wilde, Columbia
University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
CORRESPONDENCE
(With James Abbott McNeill Whistler) Wilde v. Whistler: Being an Acrimonious Correspondence on Art
between Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler (first published in Whistler's The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies, Heinemann, 1890), privately printed, 1906.
Letters after Reading, P. R. Reynolds (Sydney, Australia), 1921, published as After Reading: Letters of
Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, Beaumont (London, England), 1921.
After Berneval: Letters of Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, illustrations by Randolph Schwabe, Beaumont
Oscar Wilde's Letters to Sarah Bernhardt, edited by Sylvestre Dorian, HaldemanJulius, Co. (Girard, KS),
1924.
Some Letters from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Douglas, 18921897,preface by William Andrews Clark, Jr.,
notes by Arthur C. Dennison, Jr., and Harrison Post, additional material by A. S. W. Rosenbach, W. A.
Clark/J. H. Nash (San Francisco, CA), 1924.
Sixteen Letters from Oscar Wilde, edited and notes by John Rothenstein, CowardMcCann (New York,
NY), 1930.
Letters (includes first publication of full text of De Profundis), edited by Rupert HartDavis, Harcourt
(New York, NY), 1962, published as The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Rupert HartDavis (London, England),
1962.
Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert HartDavis, Oxford University Press (New York, NY),
1979.
Berneval: An Unpublished Letter, notes and introduction by Jeremy Mason, Tragara Press (Edinburgh,
Scotland), 1981.
Oscar Wilde—Graham Hill: A Brief Friendship, notes and introduction by Jeremy Mason, Tragara Press
(Edinburgh, Scotland), 1982.
More Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert HartDavis, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1985.
Oscar Wilde on Vegetarianism: An Unpublished Letter to Violet Fane, with an introduction and notes by
Jeremy Mason, Tragara Press (Edinburgh), 1991.
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis, Henry Holt &
Company (New York, NY), 2000.
GENERAL OMNIBUS VOLUMES
Poems by Oscar Wilde, Together with His Lecture on the English Renaissance (includes lecture first
published in New York Tribune, January 10, 1882 ), privately printed, 1903.
The Best of Oscar Wilde: Being a Collection of the Best Poems and Prose Extracts of the Writer, collected
by Oscar Herrmann, edited by W. W. Massee, illustrated by Frederick Ehrlich, Avon Press (New York,
NY), 1905.
Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1918.
Art and Decoration: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies by Oscar Wilde, Methuen (London,
England), 1920.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other
Works of Oscar Wilde, introduction by Hesketh Pearson, Dutton (New York, NY), 1930, published as
Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, 1955, reprinted with revised contents and new introduction by Isobel
Murray, 1975.
The Writings of Oscar Wilde: Poems, Short Stories, Plays, Novels, Fairy Tales, Letters, Dialogues, and
Philosophy, William Wise (New York, NY), 1931.
Poems and Essays, illustrations by Donia Nachshen, Collins (New York, NY), 1931.
The BestKnown Works of Oscar Wilde, Including the Poems, Novels, Plays, Essays, Fairy Tales, and
Dialogues, Blue Ribbon Books (New York, NY), 1931.
The Works of Oscar Wilde, illustrations by Donia Nachshen, Collins (New York, NY), 1932.
The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, B. A. Cerf/D. S. Klopfer (New York, NY), 1932.
The Poems of Oscar Wilde (includes essay "Oscar Wilde on Poets and Poetry"), Albert & Charles Boni
(New York, NY), 1935.
The BestKnown Works of Oscar Wilde, Including the Poems, Novels, Plays, Essays, and Fairy Tales,
Halcyon House (Garden City, NY), 1940.
The Portable Oscar Wilde, selected and edited by Richard Aldington, Viking (New York, NY), 1946,
revised edition selected and edited by Aldington and Stanley Weintraub, 1981.
Selected Works, with Twelve Unpublished Letters, Heinemann, 1946.
Works, edited and introduced by G. F. Maine, Collins (New York, NY), 1948, new edition, Collins (New
York, NY), 1963.
Selected Essays and Poems, introduction by Hesketh Pearson, Penguin (London, England), 1954,
reprinted as De Profundis and Other Writings, 1973.
Poems and Essays, introduction by Kingsley Amis, Collins (New York, NY), 1956.
Oscar Wilde: Selections from the Works, edited and introduced by Graham Hough, Dell (New York, NY),
1960.
Selected Writings, introduction by Richard Ellmann, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1961.
Intentions and Other Writings, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1961.
Works, introduction by John Gilhert, Spring Books (London, England), 1963, reprinted as The Works of
Oscar Wilde, 1977.
Selected Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited and introduced by Russell Fraser, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1969.
Poems in Prose and the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mason Hill Press (Pownal, VT), 1974.
The Illustrated Oscar Wilde, edited and introduced by Roy Gasson, Jupiter (London, England), 1977.
The Annotated Oscar Wilde: Poems, Fictions, Plays, Lectures, Essays, and Letters, edited, with
introduction and notes, by H. Montgomery Hyde, C. N. Potter (New York, NY), 1982, published as The
Annotated Oscar Wilde, Orbis (London, England), 1982.
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings, edited and introduced by Richard Ellmann, Bantam (New
York, NY), 1982.
The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde, edited by Owen Dudley Edwards, Barrie & Jenkins (London, England),
1989.
Aristotle at Afternoon Tea: The Rare Oscar Wilde, edited by John Wyse Jackson, Fourth Estate (London,
England), 1991.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems, Dover (Mineola, NY), 1992.
Lady Bracknell's Confinement; or, The Bunburyist: A Monologue, S. French (New York, NY), 1994.
Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest": A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Texts of the
First Production, St. James's Theatre, 1895, edited with introductory essays by Joseph Donohue and Ruth
Berggren, Colin Smyth (Gerrards Cross, England), 1995.
Wilde Anthology, Collins Publishers (San Francisco, CA), 1998.
The Best of Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Pearce, Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. (London, England),
1997.
Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, edited by Isobel Murray, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.
COMPLETE WORKS
The Writings of Oscar Wilde, 15 volumes, A. R. Keller (London, England), 1907.
Works, 15 volumes, edited by Robert Ross, Methuen (London, England), 1909, volumes I through XIV,
published by J. W. Luce (Boston, MA), 1910, reprinted in fifteen volumes as The First Collected Edition
of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 19081922, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1969.
Second Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, fourteen volumes, edited by Robert Ross,
illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, John Lane (New York, NY), 1912.
The Works of Oscar Wilde, fifteen volumes, introduction by Richard Le Gallienne, Lamb (New York,
NY), 1909, reprinted as The Sunflower Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, AMS Press (New York, NY),
1972, published as The Works of Oscar Wilde, new introduction by Stanley Weintraub, 1980.
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ten volumes, edited by Robert Ross, Bigelow, Brown & Co. (St. Paul,
MN), 1921.
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, twelve volumes, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1923.
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Vyvyan Holland, Collins (London, England), 1948, new
edition, 1966.
Essays of Oscar Wilde, edited by Hesketh Pearson, Methuen (London, England), 1950.
Oscar Wilde: Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Isobel Murray, Oxford University Press (Oxford,
England), 1979.
Oscar Wilde, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1989.
Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Penguin (New York, NY), 1990.
Complete Illustrated Stories, Plays, and Poems of Oscar Wilde, Sterling (New York, NY), 1991.
Oscar Wilde: Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, introduction by Terry Eagleton, David Campbell
Complete Short Fiction, edited by Ian Small, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.
Complete Poetry, edited by Isobel Murray, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.
Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, edited by Isobel Murray, Oxford University Press (New York,
NY), 1998.
Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, general editors Russell Jackson and Ian Small, Oxford University
Press (New York, NY), 2000.
OTHER
The Trial of Oscar Wilde from the Shorthand Reports (court transcripts), preface by Charles Grolleau,
Charles Carrington (Paris, France), 1906.
Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried (court transcripts), Ferrestone Press (London, England), 1912.
The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Regina (Wilde) v. Queensberry, Regina v. Wilde and Taylor (court transcripts),
edited and introduced by H. Montgomery Hyde, foreword by Travers Humphreys, W. Hodge (London,
England), 1948, published as The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, University Books (New York, NY), 1956,
new and enlarged 2nd edition published as Famous Trials, Seventh Series: Oscar Wilde, Penguin (London,
England), 1963, 2nd edition published with material added from 1st edition as The Trials of Oscar Wilde,
Dover (Mineola, NY), 1973.
Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, Oxford University Press (Oxford,
England), 1989.
The Decay of Lying, preface by Hugh Haughton, Syrens (New York, NY), 1995.
Oscar Wilde's Guide to Modern Living, edited by John Calvin Batchelor and Craig McNeer, Doubleday
The Importance of Being a Wit: The Insults of Oscar Wilde, compiled by Maria Leach, Carroll & Graf
Also author of lectures "Art and the Handicraftsman" and "Lecture to Art Students." Translator into English,
sometimes under pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, of such works as What Never Dies, by Barbey d'Aurevilly.
Contributor of articles, essays, reviews, and criticism such as "Woman's Dress," "More Radical Ideas upon Dress
Reform," "Sermon in Stones at Bloomsbury," "Mrs. Langtry as Hester Grazebrook," "London Models," "Some
Cruelties of Prison Life," "Oscar Wilde on Poets and Poetry," "Slaves of Fashion," "Costume," and "The
American Invasion" to periodicals, including Pall Mall Gazette, Dramatic Review, Woman's World, New York
World, Court and Society Review, English Illustrated Magazine, London Daily Chronicle, Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, and Chameleon. Newdigate Prize Poem: Ravenna, Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June
26, 1878
back to top
Poems, Articles & More
Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
Poems by Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
More poems by Oscar Wilde
Report a problem with this biography
Oscar Wilde
Poet Details
1854–1900
back to top
Poems By Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
back to top
Poet Categorization
Poet's Region
Ireland & Northern Ireland
Poet's School/Period
Victorian
Life Span
1854–1900
If you disagree with this poet's categorization, make a suggestion.
back to top
Biography
No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than
that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his
considerable contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five
plays, one of which— The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic
theater. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of
his notoriety. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and
punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were
successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol. On a curious but
productive tangent to his more serious...
Continue reading this biography
Report a problem with this biography
Other Information
Browse Poems
loading...
Poetry
The oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English language.
April 2017 Table of Contents
Buy This Issue
Subscribe to Poetry Magazine
Browse All Issues Back to 1912
Footer Menu and Information
Newsletter SignUp
1. poetryfoundation.org Biweekly updates of poetry and feature stories
Press Releases Information for the media
Poetry Magazine A preview of the upcoming issue
Poem of the day A daily email with a featured poem
2. Events Chicagoarea and Poetry Foundation events
Children's Events
American Life in Poetry Weekly column
Email Signup Enter your email address Sign Up
RSS Feeds
Articles
Poetry magazine
Poem of the Day
Harriet: News & Community
Audio Poem of the Day
Glossary Term of the Day
Network
Find us on Facebook
Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation Children
Follow us on Twitter
Poetry Foundation
Poetry Magazine
Poetry News
Poetry Now
Follow us on Tumblr
Poetry Foundation
Follow us on Instagram
Poetry Foundation
Site Index
1. Poems
Browse All Poems
Love Poems
Poems for Weddings
Children's Poems
Poets
20th Century Poets
Women Poets
2. Features
Articles
Harriet: News
& Community
Audio & Podcasts
Video
3. Resources
Learning Lab
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Children's Poetry
POETRY Mobile App
4. Poetry magazine
Subscribe
Poetry magazine Archive
From the Editors: Blog
Submissions
About the Magazine
Advertising & Media Kit
Poetry magazine Prizes
5. Programs & Initiatives
Events
Awards
Foundation Library
HMPI
Media Partners & Affiliates
Poetry Out Loud
6. About The Foundation
About Us
History and Mission
Press Releases
Plan a Visit
Staff & Board
Policies
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Jobs
Contact Poetry Foundation
General Inquiries
Poetry magazine
Media & Press
Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Plan a Visit
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
Hours: Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
© 2017 Poetry Foundation
Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.
This has learning resources.
This is good for children.
This has related video.
This has related audio.

Oscar Wilde - Poetry Foundation

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Oscar Wilde - Poetry Foundation

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

4/26/2017 Oscar Wilde | Poetry Foundation

Email Signup Enter your email address Sign Up

Вам также может понравиться