The Poems and Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was a celebrated author, poet and aesthete. Two of his most acclaimed works are his play The Importance of Being Earnest, and his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde was convicted and imprisoned for homosexual acts, and died a broken man.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Short Stories, Fiction

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Ghost of the Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

My love of Oscar Wilde began as a child when i was introduced to his fairy tales and has remained ever since, just as strong as on the day i first read The Happy Prince.
I grew up and was introduced to other more adult works, Dorian Grey and An Ideal Husband remain my personal favorites, but my heart as always had a soft spot for the fairy tales and to them i return regularly...always with the same joy and pleasure.
Some people might know these at all, hence my choosing to add them this year round to my reading list and sharing with all my impressions.
He shows a whole different side of himself here, almost the same we can see through the beauty and the pain of The Ballad of Reading Gaol....suffice to say he put pen to paper with these ones specifically with his children in mind.
Anyone who loves fairy tales should read these, anyone who loves Oscar Wilde must read this, the man had a complex yet genuine personality that deserves respect and admiration, no matter what you might think of the path his life took.
A man like Oscar Wilde is born once in a blue moon....i don't think we'll see another remotely like him anytime soon....

Happy Readings!

[Anna-Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Take a shot every time he mentions narcissus

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Everyman edition I have has all the faults one would expect from Everyman: thin, cheap paper, poor typesetting (especially in the ancient Greek where the letters are frequently wrong, and at the end of pages) no biographical notes, no dates (though the poems are probably in chronological order), no exegetical or prosody notes. That said, these poems, fairy tales, and "prose poems" are exquisite, not only as a reminder of Wilde's talent in classical literature, but also as harbingers of his theory of aesthetics. Clearly he modeled himself on Theocritus, whose talent was to make the highly polished poem look fresh and non-academic. A Victorianist friend told me that most of these poems come from his period at Oxford before he did his American tour and developed his stage persona. "Reading Gaol" is of course an exception. I was struck not only by the imitation of Theocritus, but also the obvious concern with religion in many of the poems. My friend told me that Wilde, though probably a baptized Catholic, was attracted to the Oxford Movement particularly by the aesthetic pageantry and mysticism found in Catholicism. However, my non-professional reading of the poems and especially of the fairy tales and "prose poems" leads me to think there must have been at least a semblance of genuine connection with the higher moral precepts of Catholicism as well. He clearly thought about the nature of morality deeply, a quality I had never associate with the flippant Wilde. Highly recommended for someone quite familiar with Hellenistic poetry, especially if one can find a better edition. I think many if not most of the poems would be inaccessible without this background. "Reading Gaol" is the obvious exception. The fairy tales and "prose poems" require no such background. Of course the edition only includes the English poems. Wilde wrote poetry in ancient Greek as well.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This venerable old volume is broken into three sections: poems, fairy tales, and prose poems. The first two take up more than 90% of the book, and of the three sections I found the poems the most interesting and engaging. The more one is schooled in the mythology and lore of classical Greece and Rome, the more one will get out of them, tinged as they are almost always with a melancholy sense of loss at the death of the old gods and the absence of new ones worthy to take their place. The fairy tales I found rather sentimental and tired, except in a couple of instances wherein they were saved from banality by an ironic tone or a twisted ending (e.g., "The Star Child", "The Nightingale and the Rose"). This is not Wilde at his best, but even not at his best, he's still pretty good.

[Kayley Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But surely unto thee mine eyes did show,
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.”

I somehow never read any of Oscar Wilde’s works before, and after reading this collection he is now one of my favorite poets.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can never go wrong with Wilde!

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

...loved the fairy tales and poems in prose, not so much the poetry.