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The Soul of Man & Prison Writings
In addition to the title essay, this text contains De Profundis, two letters to the Daily Chronicle concerning prison injustices, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
- GenresNonfictionEssaysClassics
248 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 1999
6 people are currently reading
267 people want to read
About the author
Oscar Wilde
5,811 books39.5k followersOscar 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 21, 2019
6 stars. Wow. Incredible book and truth bombs galore straight from the horse’s mouth. The is three little books in one. The first part is called the soul of many and says what it does on the tin. This was strong and deeply philosophical. Wilde quotes favourites of mine like the Greek legends and Ralph (where’s) waldo Emerson and others. When he does that he immediately goes into my legendary book. The second part is about this long letter to the guy that he had a homosexual relationship with Bosie / Alfred Douglas (whose uncle / father coincidentally as the marquis of Queensbury who founded the modern rules of boxing). A letter you say? How boring .. in theory yes but OMG this was a massive diatribe and cathartic outpouring to a guy that Wilde clearly loved but someone that basically used Wilde. It was littered with truth bombs that I had to underline and ponder and comment on again and again. It really reminded me of the protagonist of Maugham’s (of human bondage) who kept going back to the prostate he falls u love with. The third part is a few letters to the jail superintendent who is in charge of the place and his appeal to improve the conditions for people that are there. Anyway … here are my best bits … enjoy.
• The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—-the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge.
• “Emerson: imitation is suicide. Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”
• Isolate himself to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand under the shelter of the wall, as Plato puts it, and so to realize the perfection of what was in him.
• Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person.
• Disobedience is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.
• Man will kill himself by overwork to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.
• When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities.
• What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.
• The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
• Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
• The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
• There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud
• Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.
• But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
• Pain living and high thinking.
• Failure is to form habits.
• Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level
• Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star; but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims.
• The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable. An unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference.
• Hate blinding a person is? Do you recognise now that when I described it as an Atrophy destructive of everything but itself?
• All homage is delightful to an artist, and doubly sweet when youth brings it. Laurel and bay leaf wither when aged hands pluck them. Only youth has a right to crown an artist. That is the real privilege of being young, if youth only knew it.
• There is a tact in love, and a tact in literature: you were not sensitive to either.
• It was simply that ‘one really fatal defect of your character, your entire lack of imagination’
• The gods have given me almost everything. I have genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things. There was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. Whatever touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty .. and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me.
• If I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater? After that, I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty.
• To reject one's own experience is to arrest one's own development'
• Pain unlike pleasure wears no mask.
• One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.
• The fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich
• Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people.
• an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.
• For every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image
• It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ’s own words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato understood him
• Christ, had he been asked, would have said—I feel quite certain about it—that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.
• Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ
• With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me.
• Art only begins where imitation ends.
• A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life
• Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them
• The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—-the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge.
• “Emerson: imitation is suicide. Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”
• Isolate himself to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand under the shelter of the wall, as Plato puts it, and so to realize the perfection of what was in him.
• Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person.
• Disobedience is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.
• Man will kill himself by overwork to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.
• When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities.
• What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.
• The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
• Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
• The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
• There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud
• Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.
• But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
• Pain living and high thinking.
• Failure is to form habits.
• Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level
• Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star; but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims.
• The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable. An unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference.
• Hate blinding a person is? Do you recognise now that when I described it as an Atrophy destructive of everything but itself?
• All homage is delightful to an artist, and doubly sweet when youth brings it. Laurel and bay leaf wither when aged hands pluck them. Only youth has a right to crown an artist. That is the real privilege of being young, if youth only knew it.
• There is a tact in love, and a tact in literature: you were not sensitive to either.
• It was simply that ‘one really fatal defect of your character, your entire lack of imagination’
• The gods have given me almost everything. I have genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the colours of things. There was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. Whatever touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty .. and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me.
• If I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater? After that, I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty.
• To reject one's own experience is to arrest one's own development'
• Pain unlike pleasure wears no mask.
• One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.
• The fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich
• Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people.
• an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.
• For every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image
• It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ’s own words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato understood him
• Christ, had he been asked, would have said—I feel quite certain about it—that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.
• Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ
• With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me.
• Art only begins where imitation ends.
• A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life
• Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them
June 7, 2012
I love Oscar Wilde's philosophies and thoughts on politics and sociology. My favorite parts are those when he discusses Jesus's life and influence. His prose is poetic and fluid, interesting and engaging. The only part that dragged for me was the personal side of his letter to Sir Alfred. Some of it was interesting, but the detailed account of their friendship was too personal at parts. I honestly just didn't care what Alfred said to Wilde on the 21st of June at 1:15 PM or whatever specifics Wilde gives. But overall, an excellent and enlightening read.
I recommend this to Wilde fans, to people interested in Wilde's personal life and trial, and to people who enjoy philosophy and sociology.
I recommend this to Wilde fans, to people interested in Wilde's personal life and trial, and to people who enjoy philosophy and sociology.
August 20, 2015
This was a fascinating collection of the more serious writings of Oscar Wilde. I enjoyed the longest writing, De Profundis, but I have to admit, there were times I wanted it to end simply because there was so much whining. Just dump the dude already and move on! He's obviously just not that into you! Otherwise, the various letters were an interesting portal into another time.
September 16, 2017
"De Profundis" is required reading for any queer person who starts to grow complacent in times of relative happiness and ease. Wilde's wit suffered mightily at the hands of his oppressors, but his brilliance shines in spite (and largely because) of his pain.
Read
November 30, 2022DNF
August 9, 2013
Amongst all the documents of dissent produced in the late nineteenth century, those written by Oscar Wilde stand out because they are so focused on the humanity and autonomy of each and every individual. Even his despair has the power to bring positive change. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', written after serving two years hard labour for being gay, contains some of Oscar Wilde's most powerful images - 'But grim to see is the gallows-tree, With its adder-bitten root'
We are all the condemned man, his every movement watched by:
‘The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With yellow face of doom.’
The poem is an indictment of all those who would reduce other humans to numbers, statistics and burning dust; to all those who believe that human relationships, societies and governance should be built on cruelty and punishment. It is a poem particularly relevant to a modern Ireland where politicians daily strengthen a faceless and callous political structure that ensures bankers and bishops remain immune to any censure, whilst everybody else suffers austerity and women are denied the right to control over their own bodies.
We are all the condemned man, his every movement watched by:
‘The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With yellow face of doom.’
The poem is an indictment of all those who would reduce other humans to numbers, statistics and burning dust; to all those who believe that human relationships, societies and governance should be built on cruelty and punishment. It is a poem particularly relevant to a modern Ireland where politicians daily strengthen a faceless and callous political structure that ensures bankers and bishops remain immune to any censure, whilst everybody else suffers austerity and women are denied the right to control over their own bodies.
November 14, 2007
In The Soul of Man, Oscar WIlde has written a perfectly sane, humane, and irrefutably fabulous aesthetic justification for socialism. Read this and toss away your musty Marxist tomes.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews