Hmmm–weell, what can I say except that I can’t search for shit? The reason for the question about completeness is the ellipses in several places in all of the linked versions; I now suspect that is because it started life as a letter and the salutation and purely personal parts were redacted.
Keek: Taste is personal, of course, so no arguments if you don’t like Wilde. It seems to me though that there is a contrast between Wilde’s public “persona” (including the reports of his witty remarks and his lecture tours, etc.) and the “Big 3” works (Earnest, Dorian, Reading Gaol) everyone seems to know (at least they are the ones I know best). Earnest is entirely witty (but as someone mentioned above the characters are ultimately shallow on purpose), in Dorian the emptiness of social partying and youth culture is the point, while Reading Gaol is purposefully primitive, plaintive and filled with pathos (how’s that for alliteration?). Your criticism seems to focus on the persona while giving short shrift to his strongest written works. These, IMHO, have substance in addition to style.
Reading Gaol can be criticized, but I don’t think you would do it for being witty or empty–you are referring to his other poems as derivative?
Yes, the shorter poems where he’s trying to be Shelley or Keats. “Reading Gaol” is probably my favourite of anything he wrote, however, and I can see the wit in the plays. However, like “Dorian Grey”, the plays strike me as being very much of their time; I think his elevation of style over substance (not that there’s no substance at all, of course) - a founding tenet of the aesthetic movement to which he belonged - makes them sound rather “precious”. I’m not saying Wilde was a bad writer, by any means, but I believe he’s remembered primarily because of his life, not his work.
Keek, I suppose I’ll learn more about the Whistler accusation as I get deeper into the biography of Wilde. But I have to say that I have been unable to find any substantiation of Wilde’s being a plagiarist. He was certainly accused of it more than once during his lifetime, but as far as I have been able to ascertain those accusations seem to have sprung from wells of dislike for his personality and behaviour, not from any basis in fact.
He was accused of plagiarism after the publication of Poems (apparently Punch called it “Swinburne and water”) but again those charges seemed to arise from dislike of the man himself and discomfort with his subject matter (e.g. necrophilia and sex with statues in Charmides). As Ellman says in Oscar Wilde:
Seriously, whether or not you like Wilde’s work is immaterial (I’m not even sure how I feel about much of it) but plagiarism is a serious charge – from what texts is he supposed to have plagiarised his work on Chatterton?
Humble Servant:
Apparently Wilde himself saw flaws in Reading Gaol. In Heaney’s essay on the poem, Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (The Redress of Poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), he quotes a letter Wilde wrote to Robert Ross [bolding mine]:
Heaney also notes that Yeats revised the poem for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), cutting it down to 38 stanzas from 109. And that Yeats claimed to have made it a better poem by limiting it to a ‘stark realism’ – how’s that for one arrogant Irishman practising his arrogance on another?
Ah, Whistler vs. Wilde : truly, they would have been a match for each other! Your head would be spinning with witty repartee…
The particular anecdote that I’ve heard is that Whistler and Wilde were at a social gathering, and Wilde overheard Whistler express a particularly well-crafted zinger. Impressed, Wilde remarked “I wish I’d said that!”
Not missing a beat, Whistler responded “You will, Oscar, you will.”
That exchange is remembered through anecdote, of course, but Whistler was apparently very upset with Wilde for stealing some of his ideas and phrases, particularly in Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying.” See David Holdeman’s review of Nicholas Frankel’s book on Wilde for more on this: http://www.textual.org/text/reviews/holdeman.htm
In fairness to Wilde, though, he was by most contemporary accounts an absolutely brilliant speaker. Even when he borrowed other people’s phrases, he expressed them so well that he practically made them him own.
Ha–that’s another cool little thing I have learned from this thread. I think the stanzas about the imagined demons might go without too much harm (said the foolish critic), but some of the subjective stuff is first rate:
This stanza is inelegant–not at all what you would expect from an aesthete. The strong “da dump, da dump, da dump, da dump” rhythm is also too dogged to be beautiful. The second exclamation point is wrong, we’ve got another reference to a sword (which was also wrong in the stanza about a brave man killing the thing he loved with a sword–should’ve been a knife or a gun). Nonetheless, these “wrong” things are right for this poem because they make it seem less artful and more heart-felt. Wilde’s complaint that the poem is bad from an “artistic” perspective because it permits of more than one perspective is a back-handed (and probably self-aggrandizing) compliment.
Inelegant is mild. I would call it misconceived and malformed. But yes, I get your point; that the distress felt in prison by Wilde (and everyman), focused to an emotional extremity by the immediate physical presence of a man sentenced to death by hanging, made it difficult to keep subjectivity, self-pity and anger out of the poem and add to its sincerity, its earnestness, its tone of truth.
It was written about a real soldier. Apparently the first published version had this on the title page:
And although Wilde did write it in the months after his release that was probably not enough time to gain enough emotional distance for his aestheticism to combat those other strands in the poem.
It’s my understanding that Wilde never fully recovered from the brush with the ugly variations of reality which culminated in Reading Gaol, things from which his vaunted wit could not save him. Because of this I don’t think I would classify his comment on the poem as self-aggrandizing. I’m inclined to read it as a weary, despairing intelligence footed in an aestheticism he could feel crumbling under a need to testify about the horror he’d been made aware of.
I’m responding to the bit you quoted from Wilde’s letter to Ross about Reading Gaol, that “the production is interesting,” and that the multiple perspectives offered are to be “artistically regretted,” and I’m handicapped by not having read the letter or the Heaney essay. The quoted part made it sound to me as if by that time he was able to step away from the emotion of the poem and examine it from his “aesthetic” perspective–as if prison blew away aestheticism but that after he was out a bit he was backsliding. Kinda like how he went back to Douglas after he was out of prison for a while, to the dismay of his friends. I’m willing to be disabused on these points, however, since I have not read any biography or letters of Wilde beyond what has been linked here.
Thanks to everyone for participating in this thread. I learned a lot.
(Forgive me, HS, my last post suffered from my eyes being near to shutting on their own.)
Yes, I think we agree. He wrote the poem with the horror still at the forefront of his mind, hence its divided aims. And he ‘backslid’ to aestheticism, but was probably never able to fully regain his faith in it. Sadly.
The more I think about it, the more I think he was always, from what I can tell, interested in creating himself as a legendary figure; and aestheticism was just one means to that end. Himself as a work of art, which fits kind of nicely with your observation on self-aggrandizing.
Anyway, back to the poem.
At first glance the words ‘sweet’ and ‘rare’ seem weak and ill-chosen, because ‘sweet’ has become saccharine to us with our ready access to white sugar and its substitutes, and we think of ‘rare’ as something which doesn’t often occur. But in Wilde’s time sugar was not yet so all-available, and ‘sweet’, I think, still held a meaning of special, powerful pleasure and entrancement. While ‘rare’ still commonly meant to be: “marked by unusual quality, merit, or appeal : DISTINCTIVE b : superlative or extreme of its kind.” So in the context of when they were written this lines are stronger than they appear to me today.
I’ve wondered something else about those two stanzas. Was he talking about himself or everyone or the murderer here, I wonder? Or all of the above? I guess the grace could refer to the state of acceptance of his fate to which the murderer seemed to come:
Wilde did try to make his life art, I agree, but, while his life is now lots of fun for us at a distance (drama! scandal! fashion! notoriety!), I disagree with your “sadly.” I think Wilde was better when, as in Reading Gaol, he wasn’t superficially witty or beautiful. His “aestheticism” (which by the by I hope we don’t have to attempt to define) is most useful to him when it is being subverted as in Dorian Gray or laughed at as in the Importance of Being Earnest. His recorded wit is sharp and funny, but it gives us “a color scheme is more important than a sense of right and wrong.” That statement can make me laugh or outrage me into thinking, but it’s not substantive the way Reading Gaol is.
I called this stanza prissy–I still think it parodies poetry–“lutes” are a stereotypical prop in poems (like the swords I mentioned before), the rhyme with flutes is cute and “delicate and rare” are appropriate adjectives for an aesthetically-lived life–though it could be an uneducated guy’s view of what an aesthetic life must be like but really isn’t. So Wilde could be condemning his own life or the world’s understanding of his life.
That’s good–I hadn’t though of it that way. I was inclined to see “grace” as another reference to Christianity–there is the Biblical parable about the people who get the good spots at the wedding feast and have to be told to move down by the host while the unprepossessing guests who sat lower down are escorted by the host to the places of honor at the top of the table. “Grace” is also or course a theological term of art (term of art–he, he–I’m an aesthete now too).
To return to a point Gyrate made on the first page – there’s an account of Wilde’s tour of America in Star-Spangled Eden: 19th-Century America Through the Eyes of…British Travelers (link) – short on analysis, but interesting.