Today, it is cooland raining in London. The Grandma is resting at the Cumberland Hotel reading about the life of OscarWilde, the greatest Irish novelist and creator of ThePicture of Dorian Gray, a masterpiece that shows us that the reckless pursuit of beauty and pleasure without moral responsibility leads to corruption and self-destruction. It highlights the danger of valuing appearance over the integrity of the soul. It is one of The Grandma'sfavourite novels of all time.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854-30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright.
After
writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw
him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best
remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency
for consensual homosexual acts, imprisonment, and early death at age 46.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Greats;
he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at
Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. He became associated with the
emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and socialcircles.
As a spokesman for aestheticism,
he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book
of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new English Renaissance in Art
and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked
prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress
and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.
At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, andbeauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of DorianGray (1890).
The opportunity to
construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger
social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in
French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an
absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the
English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the
early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of
late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde
prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess
was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial
unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men.
After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897.
During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis, published posthumously in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.
On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland orBritain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
Wilde died of meningitis on 30 November 1900. Wilde
was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris; in 1909
his remains were disinterred and transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery,
inside the city. His tomb there was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein. It
was commissioned by Robert Ross, who asked for a small compartment to be
made for his own ashes, which were duly transferred in 1950.
In 2017, Wilde was among an estimated 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered offences under the Policing and Crime Act 2017, homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967. The 2017 Act implements what is known informally as the Alan Turinglaw.
Today, The Grandma has received the visit of JordiSantanyí, a closer friend. He is a great writer and they like talking together about Literature and authors.
Jordi has been explaining some interesting stories about Edgar Allan Poe, one of the best writers of the Universal Literature, who died on a day like today in 1849.
Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. The Grandma loves his novels and his writing style and she has searching some Poe's novels and audios to share with Jordi.
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809-October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic.
Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story.
He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year. Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood.
Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar Poe repeatedly clashed over debts, including those incurred by gambling, and the cost of Poe's secondary education. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. Edgar Poe quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name.
Edgar Allan Poe
It was at this time that his publishing career began with the anonymous collection Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to a Bostonian.
Edgar Poe and John Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Frances Allan in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and he ultimately parted ways with John Allan.
Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. He married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836. In January 1845, Poe published his poem The Raven to instant success, but Virginia died of tuberculosis two years after its publication.
Poe planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn, later renamed The Stylus, but he died before it could be produced. He died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at age 40; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other causes.
Poe and his works
influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields
such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout
popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of
his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America
present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work
in the mystery genre.
He was born Edgar Poe in Boston on January 19, 1809, the second child of English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and actor David Poe Jr. He had an elder brother William Henry Leonard Poe and a younger sister Rosalie Poe. Their grandfather David Poe Sr. emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland around 1750.
Edgar
may have been named after a character in William Shakespeare's King
Lear which the couple were performing in 1809. His father abandoned the
family in 1810, and his mother died a year later from consumption
(pulmonary tuberculosis). Poe was then taken into the home of John
Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia who dealt in a
variety of goods, including tobacco, cloth, wheat, tombstones, and
slaves. The Allans served as a foster family and gave him the name Edgar Allan Poe, though they never formally adopted him.
The
Allan family had Poe baptized in the Episcopal Church in 1812. John
Allan alternately spoiled and aggressively disciplined his foster son.
The family sailed to Britain in 1815, and Poe attended the grammar
school for a short period in Irvine, Scotland, where John Allan was
born, before rejoining the family in London in 1816. There he studied at
a boarding school in Chelsea until summer 1817. He was subsequently
entered at the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School at Stoke
Newington, then a suburb 6 km north of London.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe moved with the Allans back to Richmond, Virginia in 1820. In 1824, he served as the lieutenant of the Richmond youth honor guard as Richmond celebrated the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.
In March 1825, John Allan's uncle and business benefactor William Galt died, who was said to be one of the wealthiest men in Richmond, leaving Allan several acres of real estate. The inheritance was estimated at $750,000, equivalent to $17,000,000 in 2018. By summer 1825, Allan celebrated his expansive wealth by purchasing a two-story brick home named Moldavia.
Poe may have become engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster before he registered at the University of Virginia in February 1826 to study ancient and modern languages. The university was in its infancy, established on the ideals of its founder Thomas Jefferson. It had strict rules against gambling, horses, guns, tobacco, and alcohol, but these rules were generally ignored.
Jefferson had enacted a system of student self-government, allowing students to choose their own studies, make their own arrangements for boarding, and report all wrongdoing to the faculty. The unique system was still in chaos, and there was a high dropout rate. During his time there, Poe lost touch with Royster and also became estranged from his foster father over gambling debts.
He claimed that Allan
had not given him sufficient money to register for classes, purchase
texts, and procure and furnish a dormitory. Allan did send additional
money and clothes, but Poe's debts increased.
He
gave up on the university after a year but did not feel welcome
returning to Richmond, especially when he learned that his sweetheart
Royster had married Alexander Shelton. He traveled to Boston in April
1827, sustaining himself with odd jobs as a clerk and newspaper writer,
and he started using the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet during this period.
After
his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his
career as a writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing
to do so. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone
and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law.
American
publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather
than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also
particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. There was a booming growth in
American periodicals around this time, fueled in part by new technology,
but many did not last beyond a few issues. Publishers often refused to
pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe
repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.
Edgar Allan Poe
After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose. He placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama Politian. The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story MS. Found in a Bottle.
The story brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means. He helped Poe place some of his stories, and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia.
Poe became assistant editor of the periodical in August 1835, but White discharged him within a few weeks for being drunk on the job. Poe returned to Baltimore where he obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time. He was 26 and she was 13.
He was reinstated by
White after promising good behavior, and he went back to Richmond with
Virginia and her mother. He remained at the Messenger until January
1837. During this period, Poe claimed that its circulation increased
from 700 to 3,500. He published several poems, book reviews, critiques,
and stories in the paper.
On May 16, 1836, he and
Virginia held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony at their Richmond boarding
house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.
The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and widely
reviewed in 1838. In the summer of 1839, Poe became assistant editor of
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories,
and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had
established at the Southern Literary Messenger. Also in 1839, the
collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two
volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed
reviews. Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as
assistant at Graham's Magazine.
In
June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to
start his own journal called The Stylus, although he originally intended
to call it The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia. He
bought advertising space for his prospectus in the June 6, 1840 issue of
Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post: Prospectus of the Penn Magazine,
a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of
Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe. The journal was never produced before
Poe's death.
Around
this time, he attempted to secure a position within the administration
of President Tyler, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He
hoped to be appointed to the Custom House in Philadelphia with help from
President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick
Thomas.
Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the
appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though
Thomas believed that he had been drunk. Poe was promised an appointment,
but all positions were filled by others.
Edgar Allan Poe
One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered, and Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of her illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post. He returned to New York where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal, and later its owner. There he alienated himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded.
On January 29, 1845, his poem The Raven appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. It made Poe a household name almost instantly, though he was paid only $9 for its publication. It was concurrently published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym Quarles.
The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York in what is now the Bronx. That home is now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, relocated to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, he befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the death of a beautiful woman stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.
Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife's death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior. There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail their relationship. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance, according to Joseph W. Walker who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849 at 5:00 in the morning. He was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own. He is said to have repeatedly called out the name Reynolds on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Some sources say that Poe's final words were Lord help my poor soul. All medical records have been lost, including his death certificate.
Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as congestion of the brain or cerebral inflammation, common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. The actual cause of death remains a mystery. Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera, and rabies. One theory dating from 1872 suggests that cooping was the cause of Poe's death, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.
Poe's writing reflects his literary theories, which he presented in his criticism and also in essays such as The Poetic Principle. He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. He believed that work of quality should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believed that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea.
Poe describes his method in writing The Raven in the essay The Philosophy of Composition, and he claims to have strictly followed this method. It has been questioned whether he really followed this system, however. T. S. Eliot said: It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the result hardly does credit to the method. Biographer Joseph Wood Krutch described the essay as a rather highly ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization.
Eureka: A Prose Poem, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that presaged the Big Bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox. Poe eschewed the scientific method in Eureka and instead wrote from pure intuition. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true and considered it to be his career masterpiece. Even so, Eureka is full of scientific errors. In particular, Poe's suggestions ignored Newtonian principles regarding the density and rotation of planets.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October
1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet.
After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of
London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his
epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early
death.
The first
version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the
July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, along with five others. The
story begins with a man painting a picture of Gray. When Gray, who has a face like ivory and rose leaves, sees his finished portrait, he
breaks down. Distraught that his beauty will fade while the portrait stays
beautiful, he inadvertently makes a Faustian bargain in which only the painted
image grows old while he stays beautiful and young. For Wilde, the purpose of
art would be to guide life as if beauty alone were its object. As Gray's
portrait allows him to escape the corporeal ravages of his hedonism, Wilde
sought to juxtapose the beauty he saw in art with daily life.
Reviewers immediately
criticised the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions; The Daily Chronicle
for example, called it unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.
Wilde vigorously responded, writing to the editor of the Scots Observer, in
which he clarified his stance on ethics and aesthetics in art – If a work
of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will
see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral
lesson. He nevertheless revised it extensively for book publication in
1891: six new chapters were added, some overtly decadent passages and
homo-eroticism excised, and a preface was included consisting of twenty two
epigrams, such as Books are well written, or badly written. That is
all. Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous
possible sources of the story, a search Jershua McCormack argues is futile
because Wildehas tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and
ubiquitous that the story has escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition. Wilde claimed the plot was an idea that is as old as the history of
literature but to which I have given a new form. Modern critic Robin
McKie considered the novel to be technically mediocre, saying that the conceit
of the plot had guaranteed its fame, but the device is never pushed to its
full.
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