In a fair place
Of whin and grass,
I heard feet pass
Where no one was.
I saw a face
Bloom like a flower--
Nay, as the rainbow-shower
Of a tempestuous hour.
It was not man, or woman:
It was not human:
But, beautiful and wild,
Terribly undefiled,
I knew an unborn child.
_Oscar Wilde_
Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even as an
undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant career. When he
was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the Newdigate Prize with his
poem _Ravenna_.
Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a
writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant
paradoxical plays such as _An Ideal Husband_ and _The Importance of
Being Earnest_. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere;
his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete.
(See Preface.)
Most of his poems in prose (such as _The Happy Prince_, _The Birthday
of the Infanta_ and _The Fisherman and His Soul_) are more imaginative
and richly colored than his verse; but in one long poem, _The Ballad
of Reading Gaol_ (1898), he sounded his deepest, simplest and most
enduring note. Prison was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It
not only produced _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ but made possible his
most poignant piece of writing, _De Profundis_, only a small part of
which has been published. _Salome_, which has made the author's name a
household word, was originally written in French in 1892 and later
translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas, accompanied by the
famous illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently this heated
drama, based on the story of Herod and Herodias, was made into an
opera by Richard Strauss.
Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the forerunners of
Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching ironies. One sees the
origin of a whole school of drama in such epigrams as "The history of
woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever
known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny
that lasts." Or "There is only one thing in the world worse than being
talked about, and that is not being talked about."
Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900.