Wilde, Oscar

Wilde, Oscar (1854–1900). Dublin-born aesthete, dramatist, and, by his own declaration, genius. At Oxford Pater and Ruskin entranced him more than his classical studies, though a visit to Greece confirmed his commitment to the artist's life. His early Poems (1881) were derivative but his personality, extravagantly displayed on an American tour the following year, was original. ‘To become a work of art is the object of living,’ he wrote, anticipating The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), though much of his art went into his conversation. Something of its brilliance survives in essays like ‘The Critic as Artist’ but in the theatre he found his true métier: ‘I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal … as the lyric or sonnet.’ At the height of his powers, his ambivalent relationship to Victorian society most subtly deployed with The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), disaster struck. Publicly reviled, convicted of sodomy, he was sentenced to two years' hard labour in Reading gaol. Five years later, neglected in Paris, he was dead.

John Saunders