Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an English and Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, and critic.

His full name was Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde. By origin, he was Irish. He was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin into a very well-known family. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an ophthalmologist of world renown and the author of many scholarly works; his mother was a society lady who wrote poems about Ireland and the liberation movement and regarded her receptions as a literary salon. The young Wilde grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and affected theatrical exaltation, which could not but influence his later work and way of life.

After finishing school, he spent several years at the privileged Trinity College Dublin, after which he entered Oxford. There, under the influence of John Ruskin’s lectures, the Romantic poets, and Pre-Raphaelite art, the aesthetic views of the brilliant student took shape. The cult of Beauty, of which Wilde became an ardent propagandist, led the young man to rebellion against bourgeois values, though this rebellion was more of a purely aesthetic kind, manifesting itself not only in exquisitely beautiful poems, but also in a deliberately shocking style of dress and behavior—an extravagant suit with a sunflower in the buttonhole (later replaced by Wilde’s famous green carnation), artificially mannered, almost ritual speech intonations. Almost for the first time in the history of culture, an artist and writer regarded his entire life as an aesthetic act, becoming a precursor of the celebrities of Russia’s Silver Age, the Futurists, or the most consistent adherent of a provocative lifestyle—Salvador Dalí. Yet what in the twentieth century became almost an artistic norm was impermissible in late-nineteenth-century Victorian England. This led Wilde to tragedy.

Wilde’s very first poetry collection, Poems (1881), already demonstrated his adherence to the aesthetic current of Decadence, characterized by a cult of individualism, affected mannerism, mysticism, and pessimistic moods of loneliness and despair. His first attempt at drama, Vera; or, The Nihilists, also dates from this period. However, he did not engage in drama for the next ten years, turning instead to other genres—essays, fairy tales, and literary and artistic manifestos.