Another great artist Oscar Wilde was a wordsmith of the highest order. But again his life was destroyed in the name of morality. His poetry, plays, and writing are reeking with talent and creativity. His personal life was used against him and he was sent to prison for two years for "gross indecency", his crime? Having relations with another male.
No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which— The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic theater. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol. On a curious but productive tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two volumes of fairy tales that are delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and artistic concerns. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in Intentions (1891), and his long soul-searching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, written in 1897 from Reading Gaol.
Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who believed that style—in life as well as art—was of utmost importance. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. Montgomery Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, his mother was a poet and Irish revolutionary who published under the name "Speranza," and his father a successful eye and ear surgeon in Dublin and "author of a work which remained the standard textbook on aural surgery for many years." Though his background was literary and professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and, according to Hyde, "insisted on dressing him in girl's clothes." Dr. William Wilde was a notorious philanderer, and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son's famous trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case disclosed his sexual indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.
Here Wilde paints a picture with words giving the senses the impression you too are in the room.
Intro to A Picture of Dorian Grey
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.