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ON THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE:
‘The long serpentine line of Oscar Wilde's career is traced here like some fiery scarlet thread. This is a marvellous volume, fully worthy of Wilde's own genius.' The Times
'A whole world is here. *****' Mail on Sunday
'The year's unputdownable joy.' Spectator
'The next best thing to Wilde's own presence. Opening this book, one walks into the company of a spirit so large and generous, of such dash and charm, that one is grateful such largesse has been captured at the very moment it is being distributed – to those recipients who were once as eager, as amused, as captivated as the readers of these letters will be today.' Irish Times
'Nowhere does he seem more sympathetic, or more engaging. The letters bring you as close as you can get to the man himself – warts and all, but magic and all as well. You get a wonderful sense, such as even the best biography couldn't quite give, of Wilde in action from day to day – living in the thick of society, hustling his career forward. Perpetually gripping.' Sunday Telegraph
'Here we have the whole triumph-to-tragedy in the writer's own wonderful words.' Literary Review
--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.Product Description
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I bought my copy to determine whether I should purchase multiple copies for my English Studies class with which I aimed to read some of Wilde's 'political' and Roman Catholic 'devotional' poems - such as 'San Miniato', 'Madonna Mia' and 'On hearing the Dies Irae sung in the Sistine Chapel' - while also exploring some crucial literary distinctions between plagiarism, imitation and stylization. Despite the absence of 'Sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria' - which I'd wanted to place alongside Milton's 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont' - I found that the volume would fulfil our needs admirably, and offer much more besides.
My previous familiarity with Wilde's poems - apart from his famous 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' which concludes the selection made here - had been restricted to a precious copy of the fourth edition. Simply titled Poems., this was published in 1882 by David Bogue on Dutch hand made paper and is exquisitely bound in parchment heavily embossed with small flowers of gold. While Mighall includes some of the poems which Wilde had placed musically there under the section headings of 'Eleutheria', 'Rosa Mystica', 'Wind Flowers', 'Flowers of Gold' and 'The Fourth Movement', he has also carefully chosen many later poems to show the poet's versatility and the development of his pictorial 'Impressionistic' style, with its gem-like imagery, as in 'Symphony in Yellow':
The yellow leaves begin to fade/And flutter from the Temple elms,/And at my feet the pale green Thames/Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
Wilde's later erotic, outre 'Symbolist' and 'Decadent' style is also well represented, for example, in 'The Sphinx':
His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of new-made/wine:/ The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure of his /eyes./ His thick soft throat was white as milk and threaded with/ thin veins of blue:/ And curious pearls like frozen dew were broidered on his/ flowing silk.
Or:
What songless tongueless Ghost of Sin crept through the/ curtains of the night,/ And saw my taper burning bright, and knocked, and bade/ you enter in.
Heady stuff. And certainly not 'Swinburne and water'!
Is 'God's kindly earth' 'kindlier than men know'?
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