Oscar Fingal o'Flahertie Wills Wilde

(854-1900)

Life and Works

Wilde, the son of a surgeon, went to school in Dublin and Enniskillen, and University at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College Oxford where he gained a first class degree in Classics. He admired Ruskin greatly and was a disciple of Pater, indeed he almost came to be the incarnation of the dictum 'Art for Art's Sake'.

He was an extravagantly colourful figure in an age of sobriety: a dandy and a brilliant wit, he caused a mixture of outrage and wonder wherever he went.

He married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and they had two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. His first published work was the book of children's stories, The Happy Prince, a bitter-sweet master­piece enjoyed by adults and children alike. 1891 saw the publication of a series of works: the celebrated novel The Picture of Dorian Gray which embodied the creed of aestheticism (see below), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime as well as a series of critical essays and dialogues under the title Intentions. Drama had undergone a further decline during the Victorian Age due to the Theatre Licensing act, which authorized only two London theatres and was not repealed until 1843. Occasional verse plays had been written (e.g. by Browning) but these had generated no public interest. Oscar Wilde was instrumental in reviving the comedy of manners: and in fact during the 1890s he also produced a series of plays which were very successful on the London stage: A Woman of No Importance (1892), Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). His rather darker and more perverse Salom , which he wrote in French, came out in English in 1894 with outstanding illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Its first performance was in Paris in 1896. Wilde dared to have an openly homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (known as 'Bosie') and this was to cost him his reputation. The boy's father forced a public trial and Wilde was sent to prison for homosexual activities. In prison he composed his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which was published in 1898, was a year after his release. Until the end of this life he lived mostly in France. His meditations on his affair with 'Bosie', known as De Profundis, were published posthumously in 1905.

8. The 20-th Century

(1901-1945)

The First World War, though the end of an era in many ways, was not the only factor producing decisive change in the intellectual climate of the early years of the century. This was a new age of uncertainty: scientific discoveries such as relativity and the quantum theory destroyed assumptions about reality. Freud's work, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1901, revolutionized our view of the human mind, and numerous philosophical developments tended to undermine firm nineteenth-century beliefs in the solidity of observed reaiity. Darwin's theory of the evolution of the species had contributed to the demolition of the Victorian world-view, and this process was accelerated by the interest in marxism and socialism. In music and painting, too, the avant-garde broke away from nineteenth-century concepts of what was beautiful, often radically changing the basis of their art (one only has to think of the 'shock of the new' represented by such movements as Schoenberg's twelve-tone system in music or Cubism in painting). There was also an increasing interest in exotic societies and much work was done in the area of anthropology, and the origins of myth and literature in ancient pagan ceremony. (Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance on the origins of the Grail legend in primitive vegetation rites is a case in point).

Modernism in the visual arts began to be exhibited (Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910, Cubism first exhibited in 1907) and revolutionary manifestos of Futurism and Dada aggressively challenged to Victorian popular taste. Virginia Woolf went so far as to claim that "human nature changed" in 1910.

The cutting edge of the literary avant-garde became extremely distant from traditional conceptions of what verse or prose was. In the twenties in particular, the poetry of Eliot, with its wealth of allusions to other works, its abrupt transitions and numerous juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated parts, and the profusion of richly expressive styles pouring from Joyce's pen were truly revolutionary. After the intensity of literary experiment in the 1920s the 1930s seemed relatively sedate, a time of consolidation. The avant-garde in literature had in a certain sense become rapidly assimilated by the literary establishment, if not by the general public, and writers returned to more traditional methods of conveying their message, albeit with a tone and style fitting to the times, and with a wide-ranging mastery of form. The thirties, which began with the depression reached fever pitch in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the so-called Poet's war in which many of Britain's leading writers actually took an active part in fighting for the Republican side against General Franco. The failure of the cause, and the consciousness of the absurd sectarian squabbling among the various factions on the left led to a new mood of disillusionment with ideals which had once been held passionately. Influences from foreign literature continued to be strong. Russian novelists (Turgenev, Dostoevsky), French novelists (Zola, Flaubert) and poets (the symbolist movement in particular) all had an effect on the progress of twentieth-century English literature. The catalyzing effect of Ezra Pound (dealt with in the American section) who can be remembered for his fruitful relationships with Eliot and Yeats, as well as his own kaleidoscopic array of styles and influences, was a major factor in the period.

One curious fact was the rather reactionary stance that many of the modernist poets and novelists came to espouse during their life: their revolutions were very much personal ones and their artistic tensions often showed themselves in a near-obsession with the cult of the artist as creator, as seer, as god, leaving precious little room for other people (Yeats, Lawrence, Pound).

Poetry

The end of the Victorian era obviously did not have an immediate effect on poetic production. Traditional methods and forms continued to feature, in the work of poets such as Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and John Masefield (1878-1967). The horrors of the First World War led to a painful consciousness of the emptiness of the patriotism espoused by writers sued as Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), who himself died at the front. A number of extremely promising poets were killed in action, including Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917); but their work has survived to give us a gripping account of the brutality and absurdity of the war. The post-war years were dominated by the figures of T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) and W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), both of whom had long careers spanning a wide range of styles and forms, although Thomas Hardy, better I known as a novelist, also produced a fine body oil original work, and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) also contributed some important thought-provoking lyrics, treating much the same themes as his better-known j novels. In the thirties, W. H. Auden's work, as well as I that of his friends Stephen Spender and Louis Macneice, combined a mastery of technique with an I acute ear for colloquial speech.