Selected Poems

Although now famed chiefly as a playwright, Oscar Wilde started his career as a poet, winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1878. A disciple of Walter Pater, his determinedly ‘aesthetic’ affectations found their first literary expression in a book called Poems (1881). It was as a coming poet that he toured the United States in 1882. After his marriage two years later, Wilde for several years wrote prose, including his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it was not until the early 1890s that he began scoring his theatrical successes. Then came his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his imprisonment in 1895 for ‘homosexual offenses’. Bankrupted and disgraced, Wilde on his release exiled himself in France and there wrote The Ballad of Reading Jail, now generally recognized as his sole poetic masterwork. He died in Paris in 1900, aged 46.