Description

De Profundis is Oscar Wildes eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas Bosie. In an extended letter, Wilde accuses Lord Alfred of selfishness, shallowness, parasitism, greed, extravagance, tantrums, pettiness, and neglect. He contrasts this behaviour towards him with the selfless devotion of his close friend, Robert Ross, who became Wi De Profundis is Oscar Wildes eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas Bosie. In an extended letter, Wilde accuses Lord Alfred of selfishness, shallowness, parasitism, greed, extravagance, tantrums, pettiness, and neglect. He contrasts this behaviour towards him with the selfless devotion of his close friend, Robert Ross, who became Wildes literary executor, gave the work its title from the opening of Psalm 130 and who published a shortened version of it in 1905. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a deeply moving and characteristically generous poem on the horrors of prison life. It was published anonymously in 1898, signed only C.3.3., Wildes cell number in Reading Gaol. Wilde himself, released from his two-year prison sentence in 1897, was at the time living in France on the charity of friends and under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. This collection also includes the essay The Soul of Men Under Socialism, Wildes most outspoken defence of anarchy, and two of his Platonic dialogues, The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist in which he puts forward his provocatively witty ideas about art and this social role of the artist.