Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin Ireland on October 16, 1854. He is one of the most talented and most controversial writers of his time. He was well known for his wit, flamboyance, and creative genius and with his little dramatic training showing his natural talent for stage and theatre. He is termed a martyr by some and may be the first true self-publicist and was known for his style of dress and odd behavior.
Wilde, 1882
His Father, William Wilde, was a highly accredited doctor and his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a writer of revolutionary poems. Oscar had a brother William Charles Kingsbury along with his father’s three illegitimate children, Henry, Emily, and Mary. His sister, Isola Emily Francesca died in 1867 at only ten years of age from a sudden fever, greatly affecting Oscar and his family. He kept a lock of her hair in an envelope and later wrote the poem ‘Requiescat’ in her memory.
Oscar and his brother William both attended the Protora Royal School at Enniskillen. He had little in common with the other children. He disliked games and took more interest in flowers and sunsets. He was extremely passionate about anything that had to do with ancient Greece and with Classics.
Wilde during school years
In 1871, he was awarded a Royal School Scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin and received many awards and earned the highest honor the college offered to an undergraduate, the Foundation Scholarship. In 1874, he also won the College’s Berkley Gold Medal for Greek and was awarded a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, Oscar moved to London with his friend Frank Miles, a well-known portrait painter of the time. In 1878 his poem Ravenna was published, for which he won the Newdigate poetry prize. In 1881, he published his first collection of poetry ‘Poems’, which was well liked by critics.
In late 1881, Oscar left to travel across the United States and deliver a series of lectures on “ the aesthetics”, the belief that to create a sense of beauty was more important than anything else. The trip was only planned to last four months but instead lasted nearly a year with Oscar giving nearly three times as many lectures as planned. He met Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman, on which he made a good impression. During this time he arranged for his play Vera to be staged in New York.
...This essay discusses enough of The Picture of Dorian Gray to explain how floral imagery impacted the novel’s meaning. The use of floral imagery and symbolism has earned Wilde a place as one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.
Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century American poet, author, and critic. Poe is often described as a rebel against society and art-for-art's sake supporter who experimented in making his poems without didacticism and devoid of any meaning, but he is also respected as a genius in terms of his commitment to art and his ability to experiment with various forms of expressions (Fromm 304). In my opinion, Poe was not a rebel because he remained true to himself. Although he was influenced by traditional artists, he adapted this tradition to his personal being. Although he might have been perceived as a rebel against society because of his innovative views on the world, human beings, and poetry, I believe his work remains popular and influential today because he remained true to his style and personality. However, I agree that he was dedicated to art for art's sake because his main intention was to express himself through his work. Poe did not bother with popular styles and techniques, but he was a master poet when it comes to adapting to different styles to convey his emotions appropriately. Overall, Poe's poetry displays sentimentalism because he puts all emphasis on emotions and no emphasis on logic, but it is not limited to optimism because he displays both positive and negative emotions, and he displays them often together using both extremes in a single poem.
"Lord help my poor soul."(Neurotic Poets)The departing words of the 40-year-old American author, Edgar Allan Poe, on Sunday October 7, 1849. In Massachusetts on the 19th day of January in the year 1809, Edgar Poe was born to actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and actor David Poe Junior, making him an older brother to Rosalie Poe, and a younger one to William Henry Leonard Poe. Poe may, perchance, have been named after a character in the play that his parents were performing that year. He was never formally adopted, however, Edgar Poe was renamed Edgar Allan Poe when the John Allan family took him in after his mother deceased and his father forsook the family. The purpose of this paper is to examine the disheartening life of such an amazing poet, critic, editor and author and show how influential his success even after death can inspire us to try our hardest despite the circumstances.
Some people think with a pen, some with a clay and many think using nothing. Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater are in the first classification. As it is obvious, nobody can control what they think and similarly, as they think with a pen, their ability of concealing their characteristics in those books are without no wonder poor. Oscar Wilde claimed in the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray that "to reveal art and to conceal the artist is the art's aim" but art inevitably reveals artist since it is the mirror of artist's unreachable depths. And ý assert that whatever ý give birth is my child and resembles me. Thus artists are all parents and their children resembles them. So in this paper, I will try to scrutinize these resemblances between the parents Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater with their children The Picture of Dorian Gray and other works of Oscar Wilde and Marius the Epicurean.
“Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone,” engraves Oscar Wilde as he sets the literary table with a bountiful demonstration of Victorian satire. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is evidently a comic critic of late Victorian value (Schmidt 5). Brought into this world from Dublin, Ireland, to well-heeled parents in 1854. Wilde received an opportunity for social improvement when graduating from Oxford University, after receiving a financial scholarship that gave him a first hand account of the upper crust society lifestyle which allowed him to acquire material to poke fun at (Moss 179). Wilde shows his characters as if they knew that people where watching them. By doing that he caused the audience to feel that the actors had authentic regret about their characters actions (Foster 19).
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Michael Patrick Gillespie, Editor. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
The Importance of Being Earnest was first played in 1894 during the Victorian era. Oscar Wilde was educated at Oxford, he prospered in College and settled in London in 1878, where he was accepted into the upper-class and aristocratic circles of the society at the time. In this society he developed a set of values and attitudes in which influenced his works. The Victorian era was the period in history in which there was a rigid social class structure in which comprised of a large working class, the upper class, the aristocracy and the royal family. This rigid structure was upheld by a strong patriarchal society which was perceived to make moral decisions. The Victorian era was a time in whi...
Satire is a genre of literature that many authors have written in, particularly when writing in or about the Victorian time period. Authors would write satirical novels with the intent to provide constructive social criticism, to draw attention to issues in their society, and to shame individuals, corporations, governments, and society, in general, into improvement. Two writers who successfully use satire in their works are Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. Both writers satirize gender roles and social status in their respective works of The Importance of Being Earnest and Between the Acts. In his play, Wilde utilizes the techniques of inversion and puns to get his satire across, which work together to form a specific critique of marriage and social status in a Victorian society, and those that enforce these rules. Woolf, on the other hand, uses both parody and irony to create a more relatable and less direct viewpoint on society and the people who fit into it. Both Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf use satire to criticize gender roles and social status in a Victorian society, but through different techniques direct their satire at different audiences.
Ruddick, Nicholas. "'The Peculiar Quality of My Genius': Degeneration, Decadence, and Dorian Gray in 1890-91." Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS, 2003. 125-37. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 164. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
3rd ed. of the year. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Wilde, Oscar. The.
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and led a normal childhood. After high school, Wilde attended Oxford College and received a B.A. in 1878. During this time, he wrote Vera and The Importance of Being Earnest. In addition, "for two years Wilde had dressed in outlandish outfits, courted famous people and built his public image" (Stayley 317). Doing so earned Wilde a job with Rich...
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
Wilde, Oscar. "The Importance of Being Earnest." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.
Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is a beautifully constructed depiction of nineteenth century Victorian life. The quirky and often irreverent situations presented were often witty and amusing but in many instances revealed a biting critique of traditional expectations and behaviour. Wilde arguably would have used the play to showcase his literary prowess and it is to what extent that Wilde used the play as a platform or used the play to expose hypocritical values that would be questioned by both contemporary and modern audiences.
Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London-New York: T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1950.