Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was famously tried for sodomy, convicted, and sentenced to two years at hard labor. He just as famously refused to flee England and escape the sentence that killed him. Peter Gay, in Modernism, asks why? And what did it mean for Modernism, of which Wilde was so vocal an advocate:

That art for art’s sake had originated in France did not make it any more acceptable to those not fortunate enough to be French. But in the end it is significant that Yeats, that powerful modernist poet, wanted Wilde to stay and face his accusers. That self-sacrifice, Yeats believed, did much for Wilde’s reputation: “he owes to that decision half of his renown.” This is not very convincing. Wilde’s lasting fame rests on his writings, far more than on his willingness to accept suffering he could have escaped. But Yeats had a point: the stake of avant-garde thinking in Wilde’s history was considerable. Granted, his martyrdom, like many martyrdoms, was largely in vain. Neither the autonomy of art nor the sovereignty of the artist was much advanced by it. But Wilde’s consistent aestheticism, his courage to be pilloried as an eccentric, became a wry kind of model for a few choice spirits who would carry their defiant modernist individualism into the twentieth century.

Wilde died, significantly enough in this context, in 1900.

And Robert Peake, if you read here, you should know that over time I have reconsidered my opinion of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Wilde. He did rather sigh a lot, and whine. It was my affection for Fry clouding my judgment, I think.

And yet, I find when I picture Mr. Wilde in my mind these days he often seems to wear Mr. Fry’s rather distinctive physiognomy.

A poem from Mr. Wilde:

Impression du Matin

THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses� walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul�s
Loomed like a bubble o�er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps� flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone

— Oscar Wilde, from Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

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Note: The French title strikes me as a little precious but the poem itself is effective, if a bit romantic. Isobel Murray, in her introduction to the Oxford edition of Wilde’s Complete Poetry, says

Wilde the poet is rarely a metropolitan sophisticate: when he is, the metropolis has a flavour of Paris, rather than London.

Certainly true of this poem, which as it turns out is one that Murray singles out as being particularly Parisian in mood. Though the poem describes London, it is a London that sounds a lot like an impressionist painting of Paris. To me, anyway.

A certain irony in Oxford putting out a complete Oscar Wilde because the Oxford dons in their wisdom refused the gift of Wilde’s only volume of verse, Poems, that he self-published in 1881. Plagiarism was their cry, an accusation that followed this volume down into the late 20th Century, when critics decided to redefine it as “echoing.”

Certainly Wilde himself never apologized or acted in the least guilty about his verse. In a typical Wildean gesture, he is said to have used this “attractively” published volume as a variety of visiting card, especially in France.