The book on the nightstand: Poems. Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a man of many talents.

In Victorian England the Irish author was a writer, a playwright, an aphorist and a poet whose works are remembered, but above all the man who wrote them. The eccentric Oscar still affects everything today. His life, his acquaintances, his basking in bourgeois salons and worldly places, because Wilde was a real dandy son of his time.

An immediate, sharp and irreverent writing that, after more than a century after the writer’s death, is still imprinted on t-shirts, mugs, posters. A mass culture that celebrates Wilde making it more famous today than he was in the Victorian era. A style, that of his aphorisms, never enclosed in a true collection that can be defined by his own famous aphorism:

Cynicism is simply the art of selling things as they are, not what they should be.

What are these “things”? The English society conservative, bourgeois and respectable, for example, that the author wanted with his words to amaze, sometimes to scandalize and taunt.

If only one could teach the English how to speak, and the Irish how to listen, society would be a little more civilized.

However his first love was poetry.

In 1878 he wrote his first major work, Ravenna, in which the author describes his first encounter with the city.

And before the sunset lights
They were all turned off, within the enclosure
Murata finally found me.

And so he will do with some last meetings, like the one in the lyric dedicated to Yeats:

From his pain, and from the wrongs of the liberated world,
He finally poses under the blue veil of God.
To the subtracted life, when new life and love were still,
Here lies the youngest of the martyrs

The Poems collection testifies to the poet Wilde.

Almost all of his production on the subject dates back to his youth, with the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after his imprisonment following the accusation of homosexuality, in which Wilde talks about the death penalty and the need for forgiveness.

I never saw a man watching
with a lot of pain in the eyes
to that small veil of blue
who in prison call heaven,
and to every wandering cloud
driven by silver sails.

I loved more the Wilde novelist and aphorist than the poet, but if there is one thing I am convinced of the Oscar Wilde man is that even today he would be the same way at the time: a man who knows how to go against the tide.

Reading time
several nights with Oscar Wilde

Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture