Oscar Wilde himself was a man determined to follow his nature despite the almost universal opposition of Victorian society. Given the chance to run away and avoid arrest, he stayed, spoke up and was imprisoned and ruined for the 'crime' of being himself. No less brave was his wife, Constance, who stood by her husband and who recognized Oscar's moral courage when it would have been infinitely easier to follow the advice of her friends and to turn her back on his struggle. His literary career had achieved notoriety with the publication of The Picture Of Dorian Gray. Other acclaimed works include his plays Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance Of Being Earnest. Love, passion, obsession and loneliness combined however to defeat prudence and discretion. "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." - Oscar Wilde. He was imprisoned for sodomy. Called by one writer the "patron saint of the one liner," Wilde is notable as much for his offhand remarks as for his writing. Not one to adhere to others' standards of conduct, he once said, "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike."

If Oscar Wilde were alive today he would be a rock star living in Hollywood and would always be on the cover of gossip magazines. Oscar Wilde invented himself for the public. He was a genius who would never pass up the opportunity to tell someone of his genius but at the same time never took himself seriously. Oscar knew the duality of life, the good side and the underlying dark side and much of his life and work reflected this. He was born in Dublin and found his literary calling at an early age through letter correspondences with his mother, the Lady Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde. His mother too wrote patriotic Irish verse under the pseudonym, Speranza.

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift; his mother was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.

After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864-71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871-74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-78), which awarded him a degree with honours. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter's stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater's urging "to burn always with hard, gemlike flame." But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d'art, resulted in his famous remark: "Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!"

In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art; and in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a "fleshly poet," partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival in New York City that he had "nothing to declare but his genius." Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman's World (1887-89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.

In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian's self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending. Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates.

But Wilde's greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the conventions of the French "well-made play" (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere's Fan, demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley's celebrated illustrations.

A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde's plays "must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama." In rapid succession, Wilde's final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams--seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.

In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay The Decay of Lying (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his love relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas' father. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde's case collapsed, however, when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial.

Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.

In May 1897 Wilde was released, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer where he never lost his flair for drama by assuming the name of Sebastian Melmoth, after the well known Christian martyr slain in a hail of arrows. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, "an unconquerable gaiety of soul" that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic church, which he had long admired.

On being cross-examined at his trial

Mr. C. F. Gill (cross-examing): What is "the love that dares not speak its name?"

Wilde: "The love that dares not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "The love that dares not speak its name," and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

The Spirit Lamp, 4 May 1893

An earlier incarnation of The Chameleon , this Oxonion undergraduate magazine, edited by Lord Alfred Douglas, contains a controversial letter written by Wilde to Douglas, for which Wilde was blackmailed. The letter was read aloud at Wilde's first trial, Lord Queensberry stating, "I hear you were thoroughly well blackmailed for a disgusting letter you wrote to my son". To which Oscar Wilde replied, "The letter was a beautiful letter, and I never write except for publication." Indeed, the letter appeared in The Spirit Lamp transformed and translated into a sonnet by the French poet, Louys. The epigraph above the sonnet reads: Sonnet. A letter written in prose poetry by M. Oscar Wilde to a friend, and translated into rhymed poetry by a poet of no importance. Not only did Wilde's circle make truth of his contention that his letter was art, but Wilde hereby slips the noose held out to him that swings on the gibbet of genre, insisting that beauty evades its borders, letter, prose-poem, or sonnet.

Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, January 1893 :

My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place - it only lacks you; but go to Salisbury first.

Always, with undying love, yours,
Oscar

The Chameleon Volume 1, Number 1. London: Gay and Bird, 1894.

An undergraduate Oxford magazine whose first and only edition appeared in December of 1894. Edited by John Francis Bloxam, The Chameleon was intended to follow in the footsteps of The Spirit Lamp , an earlier Oxonian undergraduate magazine edited by Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Both magazines celebrate homosexual love, and The Chameleon , whose printing numbered only one hundred copies, sparked an immediate furor in the London press, claimed to be "an insult to the animal creation," and "garbage and offal."

The public reception of The Chameleon registered an instance of the subsequently fatal misreading of Wilde's aesthetic. Though The Chameleon had many authors, only one is put on trial. Just as Justice Wills placed Wilde at the center of a circle of corruption, the reading public (mis)placed Wilde at the heart of the magazine, as author of "The Priest and the Acolyte" a story about the carnal love between a priest and his altar boy. Wilde had neither written the story (its author was attributed to be John Edgar Bloxam, the magazine's editor) nor admired it, stating that the story was "too direct," without "nuance," though it was "at moments poisonous: which is something." In fact, Wilde's contribution had been the three pages of epigrams, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which are set at the beginning of the magazine. Much like the Preface to the first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray , the "Phrases and Philosophies" are the bulwark the reader must breach before entering the gardens and chambers of the text: Wilde's contribution thereby defines what follows.

Sonnet :

Hyacinthe! O mon coeur! jeune dieu doux et blond!
Tes yeux sont la lumiere de la mer! ta bouche,
Le sang rouge du soir ou mon soleil se couche...
Je t'aime, enfant calin, cher aux bras d'Appollon.

Tu chantais, et ma lyre est moins douce, le long
Des rameaux suspendus que la brise effarouche,
A fremir, que ta voix a chanter, quand je touche
Tes cheveux couronnes d acanthe et de houblon.

Mais tu pars! tu me fuis pour les Portes d Hercule;
Va! rafraichis tes mains dans le clair crepuscule
Des choses ou descend l'ame antique. Et reviens,

Hyacinthe adore! hyacinthe! hyacinthe!
Car je veux voir toujours dans les bois syriens
Ton beau corps etendu sur la rose et l'absinthe.

In the film Wilde Oscar Wilde was played by Stephen Fry.