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 better-known and more deservedly reputed authors. Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is not original. Punch was at the vanguard of the criticism, leveling what was to become a common charge against Wilde: “Mr. The collection met with mixed reviews, less favorable in England than in America. Most of the poems in this volume had been previously published in various Irish periodicals. at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two years later published his first book, Poems. 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.Īfter earning his B.A. 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, University of Oxford, where his poem “Ravenna” captured the prestigious Newdigate Prize in 1878. 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. His mother doted on him as a child and, according to Hyde, “insisted on dressing him in girl’s clothes.” Dr. 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. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. 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. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in Intentions (1891), and his long soul-searching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, written in 1897 from 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. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896). Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety. 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. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature. No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde.
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