Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer whose biography is a tribute to life: no boundaries could possibly put a limit to his thought or his actions. Only prejudice could, and it destroyed him.
His delicacy and his wit make his readers admire the man as well as the writer, because life and art were one in him.
You can read most of his work in this link:
Watch this video of one of his tales for children narrated by Stephen Fry, a famous English actor and writer who played the leading role in Wilde, a 1997 biographical film based on Oscar Wilde's life.
Learn about Oscar Wilde's times: Victorian England.
Read some of his quotes:
AUDIOBOOK: Listen to The Importance of Being Earnest.
I bet you won't be able to stop laughing with the following delicious scene of this masterpiece!
(You can activate the English subtitles by clicking on Choose Language (bottom left) and then English 100%).
You can download this worksheet to read some of the most hilarious moments of The Importance of Being Earnest. You can also do some additional work to learn more about this book and its author.
Click on the arrow to download it.
(You need an account in http://www.4shared.com/. Sign up, it's free).
This is a preview of the film on Wilde's life:
Read some of Wilde's words about life, love, people and other topics.
If you want to read an excellent biography on Oscar Wilde, I strongly recommend this one:
ELLMANN, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
Here are my impressions after reading it:
We can but highly recommend a
magnificent biography of Oscar Wilde by the author of other excellent
biographies, such as Joyce’s: Oscar Wilde,
by Richard Ellmann. Ellmann offers us his profound knowledge of Wilde with the
utmost credibility, unaffected by his obvious devotion towards the writer and
the person. The riches and precision of the vocabulary that he employs and the
vast array of facts about Wilde’s work and life give the reader a sensation of
following Wilde and even being an observer of his contradictions, delights,
afflictions, and, what’s more important, of his development as a human being.
Ellmann starts every chapter
with a quotation of Wilde’s words and after that provides us with a thorough
display of details of his writings, life, relations, joys, and misfortunes.
Under this light we confirm what we could glimpse when reading every one of his
books, that Wilde was pure excess, just like life, and he could not be stopped
by morals, even though these could (and did) crush him. “Though he offered
himself as an apostle of pleasure, his created work contains much pain” (p.
xiv).
He was the best company, witty
and an unequalled conversationalist, always generous with his guests and acquaintances,
lovers or even strangers. He didn’t receive the same token when he was accused
of immorality and sent to prison. Most of his friends abandoned him and refused
to help, and the few years he lived after being in jail he was ruined. He died
in exile accompanied only by a couple of friends, Reggie Turner and especially
Robert Ross, who never left him. His personality and his intelligence were not
fit for the times, which were but rigid and hypocritical, and nothing was more
alien to Wilde, whose passion for life was endless and could not possibly be
hidden.
Life or art, what comes first?
Both were irresistible for Wilde, but there can be no doubt when knowing him in
such depth as Ellmann does: Life is generosity and splendor, but it comes
second, as it can only imitate art, and only the latter can come near
perfection and is a mirror to life. Art is the true creator, and only creators
can shape life. This explains why Wilde was so careful with every detail, every
word he chose, every garment he wore, his hair, his surroundings, his home and
its decoration, etc. Everything had to be perfect, a work of art, for life
deserves no less. Morality is only a constraint and limits the creator. Only
intelligence and taste can prevail. That’s why he never confined himself to one
specific faith or group (he played with the idea of becoming a Christian and
joined masonry at the same time!). Why not taste them all? He had to be sent to
prison by the society that he had exposed to put limits to his passion for
life, and that killed him. We can imagine the suffering of such sensibility
imprisoned. No blue china, no champagne, no books, no words, no air. A man of
his delicacy could not survive the lack of beauty and the fetid air of jail.
His purity was suicidal.
“Essentially Wilde was
conducting, in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical
reconsideration of its ethics. He knew all the secrets and could expose all the
pretense. Along with Blake and Nietzsche, he was proposing that good and evil
are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of
behavior. His greatness as a writer is partly the result of the enlargement of
sympathy which he demanded for society’s victims” (p. xiv). “We inherit his struggle
to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to
bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and
singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of
severity by one of sympathy” (p. 553).
Wilde, we dare add, couldn’t
possibly have had a more appropriate name and definitely honoured it, as
Ellmann’s biography depicts with such precision and elegance.
To: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde,
Great stuff you have here about Oscar Wilde! I like reading his work and I find his wit delicious. That's why I also have some of his quotes on my blog!
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work!
He is one of my favourite writers, too. Re-reading him is always a pleasure, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThank you for stopping by, Helena.