The Poetry of Oscar Wilde

Best known as a wit and a playwright, Wilde began his career as a poet, and this volume gathers the lyric work of his early Poems alongside the very different piece that closed his writing life. The early verse is lush and aesthetic, steeped in classical myth, Catholic ritual, and the beauty of Italy and Greece. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after his imprisonment, strips all that away for a plain, haunted account of a hanged man and the shared guilt of everyone who watches. Set together, they trace the distance between the young aesthete and the broken, compassionate voice of his last years. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings the poems together.