Chapter I. The life of oscar wilde

1.2. O.Wilde and English literature

Oscar Wilde, one of the most compelling and magical literary figures, mesmerized the generations with his witty, philosophical, and creative thoughts. His efforts to display aesthetic values instead of moraland social themeswon laurels from his readers and fellow writers alike. Besides literary accomplishments, he also won hearts for his genuine witthat enabled him to express his ideas about life, death, and alienation in a professional way. Today, when modern writers write, more often they try to imitate his style for the uniqueness his work demonstrates.
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. 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.
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. 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 earning his B.A. at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two years later published his first book, Poems.⁷ 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 better-known 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.’”