OSCAR WILDE(1854-1900)

OSCAR WILDE(1854-1900)

I have nothing to declareexcept my genius!

Oscar Wilde three days before his death in Hotel

d’Alsace, Paris• “Some said my

life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple.”

Oscar Wilde’s Paradoxes

• I am not young enough to know everything.

• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

• Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

• Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

• Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.

• It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

• Women, as someone says, love with their ears, just as men love with their eyes, if they ever love at all.

• It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

• Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

• Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They discover everything except the obvious.

• To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

• The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young, and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

• Men become old, but they never become good.

• I like men with a future and women with a past.

• Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

• Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

• A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

• Men become old, but they never become good.

• Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

• Every good man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

• One should always be in love. This is the reason one should never marry.

• I can resist anything except temptation.

• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

• There is no sin except stupidity.

• To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

• Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better.

• One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

• Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

• In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

• Bad manners make a journalist.• It is a very sad thing that nowadays

there is so little useless information.• One should always play fairly when

one has the winning cards.

• Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

• The English public take no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is obscene.

• Genius is born, not paid.

• She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

• Brilliant talker, poet, writer and aesthete, Oscar Wilde’s destiny was often compared to that of Byron; both had troubled family histories, both were wild in heart and temperament, both liked to shock the surrounding world with their manners and behavior, both displayed the same discontent for their contemporary codes of moral and social conduct.

• Both Oscar Wilde and Byron were followed by scandals in their lives, both were cruelly judged by the British law and both were considered unworthy for burial in Westminster Abbey. Like Byron, Oscar Wilde travelled abroad to visit and lecture; unlike Byron, Oscar Wilde did not take part passionately in the events of his time.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

• was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, the son of Dr. William (later Sir William) Wilde, a surgeon, and Jane Francesca Elgee, who liked to call herself Speranza, in order to associate herself with Dante Alighieri and the Italian aristocracy, from which she believed she was descended.

• Wilde Family home on Merrion Square

Merrion Square House and Merion Square

Lady Jane Wilde• She also instilled in

Wilde a love of paradox. Lady Jane Wilde was an affected lady, who passionately defended the idea of Irish liberty.

• William Wilde

• In 1864, Wilde was knighted, but his reputation suffered severely when Mary Travers, a long-term patient of his and the daughter of a colleague, brought a case against him, accusing him of having raped her while she was anaesthetised under chloroform. Oscar Wilde later recalled the incident and blamed his father not for bending the rules of ethics but for the vulgar publicity the event had caused.

• As a young boy, Oscar Wilde was encouraged by both parents to sit among such visitors as John Ruskin - later an influential teacher and friend at Oxford -and fetch books for his father, or amuse adults with his stories.

Portora Royal School• At the age of 9

nine, Wilde was sent to the Portora Royal School, which some years later also cultivated Samuel Beckett.

• Wilde and his mother were very superstitious people, and Wilde claimed to have been visited by both his mother and his wife on the eve of their deaths, although on both occasions he was separated by many miles.

• This immersion in the supernatural had an impact on Wilde’s stories, particularly Dorian Gray and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, in which the protagonist is driven to absurd distraction by the prediction of a white-knuckled fortune-teller.

• He was also influenced in this stage by Speranza’s memory of her uncle Charles Maturin, an early author in the horror-fantasy genre - and a source of great pride for the family - and by Bram Stoker (author of Dracula), who was a frequent guest at Merrion Square.

• Between 1871–1874, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–1878), where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna.

• Wilde became devoted to Aestheticism during his Oxford Years, when he also started to create his image and his cult by wearing long hair and dressing quite peculiarly.

• At a time when men’s fashion favored dark suits and classical ties, Wilde covered his fingers with flashy rings, wore a huge bow for a tie, and carried a cane for effect. He dressed in white pants with matching gloves, patent leather shoes, and a jacket accessorized with a contrasting handkerchief in the breast pocket.

• His Oxford peers considered him silly and insulted him, but his new look succeeded in putting him at the center of attention, which was what he wanted.

• Wilde cultivated good taste by decorating his rooms lavishly with sunflowers, lilies, peacock feathers, objects of art and blue china, and, just like many Oxford students, he found his pleasures with the local prostitutes. Wilde was unlucky and fell ill with syphilis.

• Even though no effective treatment had been discovered, his doctors tried their best. They subjected him to repeated doses of mercury, which probably did the bacteria little harm but did turn his teeth black.

• The philosophical foundations of Aestheticism were formulated in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant, who spoke for the autonomy of art. Art was to exist for its own sake, for its own essence or beauty.

• The artist was not to be concerned about morality or utility or even the pleasure that a work might bring to its audience. Aestheticism was supported in Germany by Goethe and in England by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.

• Decadent writers used the slogan Art for Art’s Sake (L’art pour l’art), first used by Benjamin Constant in 1804. Victor Cousin popularized the words that became a catch-phrase for Aestheticism in the 1890’s. French writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Pierre Baudelaire contributed significantly to the movement. Such writers asserted that there was no connection between art and morality.

• The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. They believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it must only be beautiful.

• The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects — i.e. association between words, colours and music.

• Wilde was especially influenced as a college student by the works of the English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne and the American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

• The English essayist Walter Pater, an advocate of “art for art’s sake,” helped to form Wilde’s humanistic aesthetics in which he was more concerned with the individual, the self, than with popular movements like Industrialism or Capitalism. Art was not meant to instruct and should not concern itself with social, moral, or political guidance.

• Like Baudelaire, Wilde advocated freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of society. This point of view contradicted Victorian convention in which the arts were supposed to be spiritually uplifting and instructive. Wilde went a step further and stated that the artist’s life was even more important than any work that he produced; his life was to be his most important body of work.

• Wilde published his first work in verse, Chorus of Cloud-Maidens, in the Dublin University Magazine in November 1875. A loose translation of songs from Aristophanes’ The Clouds, the work indicates Wilde’s interest in the classics.

• His father died in 1876 and left the family with a lot of debts and little money. In 1878 he graduated from Oxford and his mother moved to London and established her Salon in Chelsea.

• To add to his problems, he was disappointed in love by Florence Balcombe - one of the three most beautiful Victorian women - when she broke off the relationship without telling him and married Bram Stoker. Wilde confessed that he enjoyed the drama of his role as the abandoned lover.

• Florence Balcombe “the two sweet years – the sweetest years of all my youth“ – Oscar Wilde

• In 1881 Wilde published Poems, a volume that was immensely successful. The poems in the volume demonstrate eclectic interests, numerous and very different influences, attempting to reconstitute the beauty of the details of spiritual life.

• Requiescat, the poem he dedicated to his sister’s memory, Isola, who died of meningitis at the age of 9, and whose death affected him profoundly, demonstrates in simple words the poet’s inability to separate himself from his sister.

RequiescatTread lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can

hearThe daisies grow

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,She that was young

and fairFallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

She hardly knewShe was a woman,

soSweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast,I vex my heart

alone,She is at rest.

Peace, peace, she cannot hearLyre or sonnet,All my life's buried here,Heap earth upon it.

• The success of the Poems led to a lecture tour in the United States in 1882 which helped his fame. He found himself in a interesting position: he was famous and idolized in both UK and USA on account of a single volume of Poems, which were not very original.

• In all his public appearances Wilde, who proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater, displayed a flamboyant aestheticism that did much to increase his fame. Wilde returned to the United States in 1883 in order to attend an unsuccessful New York production of his play Vera, written the year before.

• Vera, Wilde’s first play, and the first to be performed, is a melodramatic tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the story of Vera Zasulich, a maid in her father’s tavern, situated on a road to the prison camps in Siberia. Vera becomes the top assassin of a group of Nihilists.

• After a series of twisted events, she is given the mission to kill the Tsar, whom she has fallen in love with. Instead, she stabs herself and dies melodramatically claiming she has saved Russia.

• In 1880, an attempt was made for the play to be performed in England, but it never materialized. The first ever public performance was in New York in 1883 at the Union Square Theatre based on revisions made by Wilde while lecturing in America in 1882.

• On May 29, 1884, at the age of 29, after moving to London, he married Constance Mary Lloyd, whom with he enjoyed a horrible marriage and Wilde ignored his two children.

Constance Lloyd and her son Cyril in 1889

• Constance, Wilde’s wife, died April 7, 1898. They had two sons, Cyril (born June 5, 1885) and Vyvyan (born November 5, 1886). Wilde’s wife changed her name and that of her sons to Holland in September 1895 because of her husband’s trials and imprisonment. Between 1887-1889, Wilde was editor for Woman’s World magazine, and was less productive creatively.

• In 1887 Wilde began The Portrait of Mr. W. H, which he published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in July 1889. It is a short story, which advances the theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written out of the poet’s love of the boy actor Willie Hughes.

• The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a volume of fairy tales written for his two sons, appeared in 1888. Interpreted as tales for children The Happy Prince and Other Tales fully demonstrate the fact that Wilde was still inconsistent in his aesthetic thinking.

• Oscar Wilde was trying to find, in the surrounding world, the elements which constitute the principle of beauty, eliminating those of good and evil. In The Happy Prince and Other Tales Wilde proves unable to separate the notions of good and beauty which coincide in the volume.

• The tales bring into light the moral values of human existence; the Prince sacrifices himself and dies trying to give humankind a bit of happiness, suffering being caused in here not by an aspiration for beauty but by painful poverty. Being clearly influenced by Andersen, Oscar Wilde recreates the image of beauty, which he finds symbolically only in statues.

• His tales tackle fundamental issues for social existence, highlight human beings who need first and foremost goodness, doubled by beauty, and praise elementary ethical virtues such as devotion, friendship, modesty and human solidarity.

• The Prince cries when seeing the pain of his former fellow human beings; Hans the hero in The Devoted Friend, defends the ideal of friendship even if he has to sacrifice himself and The Remarkable Rocket demonstrates that pride has a terrible price.

• The Happy Prince and Other Tales was followed by his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 and in book form in 1891. Also in 1891, Wilde’s play The Duchess of Padua was produced in New York under another title and anonymously, without much success.

• Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, a plea for artistic freedom, appeared in 1891, as did Intentions, containing the critical dialogues The Decay of Lying and Pen, Pencil and Poison, The Critic as Artist; The Truth of Masks, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories; and another collection of fairy tales, The House of Pomegranates.

The Decay of Lying – An Observation

• first published in January 1889. Wilde called it a “trumpet against the gate of dullness” in a letter to Kate Terry Lewis. The dialogue, which Wilde felt was his best, takes place in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire.

• The participants are Cyril and Vivian, which were the names of Wilde’s sons (the latter spelled “Vyvyan”). Almost immediately, Vivian advocates one of the doctrines of Wilde’s Aestheticism: Art is superior to Nature.

• Nature has good intentions but can’t carry them out, it is crude, monotonous, and lacking in design when compared to Art. According to Vivian, man needs the temperament of the true liar with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind.

• Artists with this attitude will not be bound by sterile facts but will be able to tell beautiful truths that have nothing to do with fact.

Aestheticism, as summed up by Vyvyan, has four

doctrines:

1. Art never expresses anything but itself;

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals;

3. Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life;

4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Pen, Pencil and Poison. A Study in

Green • first published in January 1889. It

is a biographical essay on the notorious writer, murderer, and forger Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who used the pen name Janus Weathercock.

• Wilde asserts that Wainewright’s criminal activities reveal the soul of a true artist. The artist must have a concentration of vision and intensity of purpose that exclude moral or ethical judgment. The artist often will conceal his identity behind a mask, but Wilde maintains that the mask is more revealing than the actual face.

• Disguises intensify the artist’s personality. Life itself is an art, and the true artist presents his life as his finest work. Wilde, who attempted to make this distinction in his own life through his attempts to re-create himself, includes this theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Critic as Artist • the longest of the essays in Intentions,

first appeared in two parts (July and September 1890) with the significant title, The True Function and Value in Criticism; With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue.

• It is considered to be a response to Matthew Arnold’s essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1865). Arnold’s position is that the creative faculty is higher than the critical. The central thesis of Wilde’s essay is that the critic must reach beyond the creative work that he considers.

• The setting of the dialogue is a library in a house in London’s Piccadilly area overlooking Green Park, and the principal characters are Gilbert and Ernest. Along with the central theme of the importance of the critic, Gilbert advocates the significance of the individual. The man makes the times; the times do not make the man.

• Further, he advocates that sin is an essential element of progress. Sin helps assert individuality and avoid the monotony of conformity. Rules of morality are non-creative and, thus, evil.

The Truth of Masks - A Note on Illusion

• first appeared in May 1885 under the title Shakespeare and Stage Costume.

• The essay originally was a response to an article written by Lord Lytton in December 1884, in which Lytton argues that Shakespeare had little interest in the costumes that his characters wear.

• Wilde takes the opposite position. More important within the context of Intentions, Wilde himself always put great emphasis on appearance and the masks, or costumes, with which the artist or individual confronts the world. Wilde also raises the question of self-contradiction.

• For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

• first appeared in February 1891. In it, Wilde expresses his Aesthetics primarily through the emphasis that the essay places on the individual. In an unusual interpretation of socialism, Wilde believed that the individual would be allowed to flourish under the system.

• He thus warns against tyrannical rulers and concludes that the best form of government for the artist is no government at all. In this essay, it’s easy to see that Wilde loved to shock. While Wilde wouldn’t want to be accused of sincerity, he was certainly devoted to Aestheticism in his life as well as his art.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

•  - the tale of a hedonistic Adonis with the tormented soul of a satyr - first appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine, June 1890. Revised and extended in book form, published by Ward, Lock and Company, April 1891.

• Dorian is a beautiful young man who attracts men and women alike. One day while Basil Hallward, a painter who is fascinated with Dorian, paints his portrait, Dorian wishes that he might retain his beauty, and that his portrait should bear the marks of age in his stead. His wish is miraculously granted, and he lives a life devoted to beauty and pleasure at the expense of the men and women who are irresistibly attracted to him.

• Dorian faces his portrait in the 1945 "The Picture of Dorian Gray", a notable adaptation of the novel

• As Dorian ages, he realizes that the portrait bears not just the marks of age, but reveals his narcissistic soul in hideous detail and he hides it under cover in a locked room. At the book’s climax, Dorian shows the portrait to Hallward, but he can’t stand to have his ugly interior exposed, so he kills the painter.

• The book ends when Dorian stabs the portrait in a fit of rage and then dies because the painting no longer represents him, but has become his wicked soul.

Ivan Albright The Picture of Dorian Gray, oil on canvas

1943

Sources and influences

• The Greek ideal of beauty, particularly male beauty, seen in the myth of Narcissus (Ovid) (Echo pursues Narcissus without success, Narcissus falls in love with his reflected image in the waters, dies) - Narcissus in Art (includes psychological analysis of narcissistic personality disorder);

• the myth of Adonis

• Faust legends- Faust by Goethe (1790) (man makes pact with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for earthly pleasures);

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764);

• Family Portraits by Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries (1812);

• Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats (“beauty is truth, truth beauty”, the credo of aestheticism);

• Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (Wilde’s mother’s uncle) (1820) (includes the painting of an ancestor who made a deal with the devil, lives 150 years without aging, then suddenly ages and dies);

• Le Peau de Chagrin by Honore de Balzac (1831) (Raphael receives a talisman (ass’s skin) that grants all his wishes, self indulgence follows and the skin shrinks gradually);

• The Oval Portrait (1845) and William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe;

• The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater (1878);

• Theophile Gautier and the French symbolists;

• A Rebours by Huysmans (1884) (the protagonist Des Esseintes retreats from the philistine real world, creates a world of artifice and decadent self-indulgence in his house )

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1887) (classic double-sided personality story)

• Sources from which Wilde drew for his novel include the Faust legend and the Narcissus myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

• Critics cite various sources for the changing portrait motif. One is that the writer sat for a painter named Basil Ward, who, after finishing the portrait, remarked that it would be delightful if Wilde could remain as he was while the picture aged.

• However, there is no historical indication that Wilde ever sat for a Basil Ward. Another version of this story links the concept of a portrait aging to a Canadian artist named Frances Richards.

• Some critics remarked that the politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) anonymously published a book called Vivian Grey in the 1820’s and that this novel anticipates Wilde’s work.

Themes• corrupting influence; decadence;

dandies; new hedonism, carpe diem, Epicureanism; relationship of art and morality/ethics; narcissism; vanity; aestheticism (art for art’s sake); the doppelganger or double, the secret double life, the gothic imagination, poisonous books; Victorian gothic obsession with evil, guilt, repression, conscience;

• beauty and truth; scientific materialism and determinism (world of sensation); realism vs. romanticism;

• physiognomy (the belief that appearance reveals character), art and truth, appearance versus essence,

• public image-private shame, split self, morality and immorality, youth, experience, moral depravity, manipulation, self-discovery, the dual nature of man, sin and redemption.

• Like his novel’s antihero, Dorian Gray, Wilde did not understand identity “as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” but as a succession of masks and guises to be put on and taken off as he desired.

• Wilde first found theatrical success with his play Lady Windermere’s Fan – A Play about a Good Woman (1892), which combined social observation with a witty, epigrammatic style.

• The story features Lady Windermere, who discovers that her husband may be having an affair with another woman. She confronts her husband but he instead invites the other woman, Mrs Erlynne, the woman with a past, to his wife’s birthday ball.

• Angered by her husband’s unfaithfulness, Lady Windermere intends to leave her husband and run away, thus repeating Mrs Erlynne’s (her mother’s) mistake. After discovering that, Mrs Erlynne follows Lady Windermere and attempts to persuade her to return to her husband and in the course of this, Mrs Erlynne is discovered in a compromising position.

• It is then revealed Mrs Erlynne is Lady Windermere’s mother, who abandoned her family twenty years before the time the play is set. Mrs Erlynne sacrifices herself and her reputation in order to save her daughter’s marriage. 

• This formula was pursued successfully in the plays that followed, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

A Woman of No Importance (1893)

• is a play about money, innocence and past secrets that are revealed to affect the present. The main theme is the secrets of the upper-classes: Lord Illingworth discovers that the young man he has employed as a secretary is in fact his illegitimate son, a situation similar to the central plot of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Secrets would also affect the characters of The Importance of Being Earnest.

• A Woman of No Importance (1893)

• An Ideal Husband (1895) is a comedy set in London, revolving around such topics as past sins, redemption, blackmail, political corruption, public and private honour, and the position of women in society.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for

Serious People (1895), • the most popular of Wilde’s plays,  is a

comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ in order to escape social obligations. The play is a satire of society, repeatedly attacking Victorian customs and traditions, marriage and love.

Salomé- A Tragedy in One Act,

• published in French in 1893, is a tragedy about religion and human nature, which tells the story of Salome, the stepdaughter of the  Herod Antipas, who, to her stepfather’s dismay but mother’s delight, asks for the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. 

• The play was translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894 and performed in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, after being denied a license in England for depicting biblical characters.

• Lord Alfred, whom Wilde had first met in 1891, was Wilde’s lover, and their relationship so disturbed the Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Alfred’s father, that he publicly insulted Wilde on several occasions beginning in 1894.

• Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas

• Lord Alfred Douglas, “Bossie”, in 1903

• This prompted Wilde to bring a charge of criminal libel against Lord Queensberry, but the suit was dismissed, and Wilde, after two trials, was imprisoned for homosexual offenses in 1895. In prison, where he remained for two years, Wilde wrote a letter to Lord Alfred that was partially published in 1905 as De Profundis. It contained his own justification for his conduct.

• De Profundis is an epistle written by Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s work was closely supervised and he was not allowed to send the letter, but took it with him upon release, and he gave the manuscript to the journalist Robert Ross who published it in 1905 giving it its present title from Psalm 130.

Beginning ofDe Profundis

• Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

Last Paragraph• All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are

sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

• After his release in 1897, Wilde went to France, where he published The Ballad of Reading Gaol (written 1897), inspired by his prison experiences.

The Reading Gaol• Published

anonymously (under the name C.3.3., indicating Wilde’s prison number) on February 13, 1898, the poem was reprinted the same month. Seven editions had been published by June 1899, when Wilde’s name first appeared on the poem.

• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897) is dedicated to the memory of the Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, and the central incident is Wooldridge’s execution for the murder of his wife.

• Wilde’s best-known poem,The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by his two-year imprisonment, is his most didactic work, one that emerged from the clash of various styles, as he himself said: The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda.

• Nevertheless, its force remains undisputed, and its skill in telling the story of the last days of a Royal Horse Guards trooper who killed his wife and who was sentenced to hang evokes the central theme of this deeply felt poem, which echoes Wilde’s own self-destruction:

The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.

• The autobiographical element is made clear in Wilde’s pun on his own name and society’s exposure of Wilde’s own double life - the successful married writer leading the a subterranean life:

And all the woe that moved him soThat he gave that bitter cry,And the wild regrets, and the bloody

sweats,None knew so well as I:For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.

Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,

And some when they are old;Some strangle with the hands of Lust,Some with the hands of Gold:The kindest use a knife, becauseThe dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy;Some do the deed with many tears,And some without a sigh:For each man kills the thing he

loves,Yet each man does not die.

• In exile, he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, taken from Charles Robert Maturin’s gothic romance Melmoth the Wanderer.

• Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, penniless, in a cheap Paris hotel at the age of 46 and was buried in Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris; in 1909 his remains were disinterred and transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery, in a tomb designed by Sir Jacob Epstein.

Oscar Wilde’s Tomb in Pere Lachaise Cemetery,

Paris

Oscar Wilde

“Everything is going to be fine in the end. 

If it's not fine,it's not the end.”