`Yet each man kills the thing he
loves, By 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!'
A powerful poem of universal
guilt and a protest against capital punishment, The
Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's best-known poem,
yet it is quite unlike the rest of his poetry. At Oxford
Wilde discarded the passion and politics of his mother's
Irish nationalistic anti-famine poetry and opted to
follow an English Romantic tradition, paying tribute to
Keats, Swinburne, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Admiration of
French masters gradually led to his writing
Impressionist, even decadent poems and his collection
Poems (1881) brought accusations of obscenity
and plagiarism as well as scathing reviews. Unabashed,
Wilde revised and reprinted his final `Author's Edition'
in 1892, by which time he was the successful author of
fiction, criticism, and Lady Windermere's Fan.
This volume follows as closely as possible the
chronological order of composition, highlighting
autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's
conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and
Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman
Catholicism. The Appendix shows Wilde's original
ordering, constructed with great care around a `musical'
arrangement of themes. The poems reveal unexpected
aspects of a literary chameleon usually identified with
sparkling wit and social comedy.
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