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Oscar Wilde's Poetry and Aestheticism

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This paper discusses the ways in which Wilde's poetry and aestheticism paradoxically celebrated their shared or parallel "marginal" status in the context of Victorian culture. Compared with his plays, fiction and critical essays, Wilde's poetry has been given insufficient critical attention, and it is worth exploring why Wilde the poet so consistently produced pastorals throughout his literary career. As a subgenre of poetry, the pastoral is significantly permeated with a sense of loss and belatedness because such an ideal and care-free world of shepherds and shepherdesses as depicted in the pastoral is a deliberately artificial and conventional--read "generic" here--construct. The pastoral represents, among other things, a delightful defiance of the very pressure of reality, and this generic or internal "logic" can be also witnessed in Wilde's famous aesthetic credo that "Life imitates Art," a reversal of the time-honored mimetic view that art functions as "a mirror held up to nature." According to Wilde's wry perspective, the public's lack of interest in poetry resulted in an ironic protection of it from the relentless materialism of the Victorian age. In a similar vein, aestheticism was past its prime when Wilde self-consciously appointed himself its chief representative. Regardless of his international fame after his lecture tour to the US (1882-1883), he was fully aware of his own culturally “marginal” position as an aesthete and nevertheless waged his aesthetic campaign cheerfully and valiantly.

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which Wilde's poetry and aestheticism paradoxically celebrated their shared or parallel "marginal" status in the context of Victorian culture. Compared with his plays, fiction and critical essays, Wilde's poetry has been given insufficient critical attention, and it is worth exploring why Wilde the poet so consistently produced pastorals throughout his literary career. As a subgenre of poetry, the pastoral is significantly permeated with a sense of loss and belatedness because such an ideal and care-free world of shepherds and shepherdesses as depicted in the pastoral is a deliberately artificial and conventional--read "generic" here--construct. The pastoral represents, among other things, a delightful defiance of the very pressure of reality, and this generic or internal "logic" can be also witnessed in Wilde's famous aesthetic credo that "Life imitates Art," a reversal of the time-honored mimetic view that art functions as "a mirror held up to nature." According to Wilde's wry perspective, the public's lack of interest in poetry resulted in an ironic protection of it from the relentless materialism of the Victorian age. In a similar vein, aestheticism was past its prime when Wilde self-consciously appointed himself its chief representative. Regardless of his international fame after his lecture tour to the US (1882-1883), he was fully aware of his own culturally “marginal” position as an aesthete and nevertheless waged his aesthetic campaign cheerfully and valiantly.

참고문헌 (18)

  1. Gide, André, "Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality" (2011), Transaction
  2. Keats, John, "Selected Letters of John Keats" (2002), Harvard UP
  3. Larkin, Philip, "Collected Poems" (2004), Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  4. Tennyson, Alfred, "Tennyson's Poetry" (1971), Norton
  5. Wilde, Oscar, "Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Centenary ed" (1999), HarperCollins
  6. Beckson, Karl, "Wilde as Poet", Raby, pp.57~68 (1997)
  7. Bloom, Harold, "Oscar Wilde" (1985), Chelsea
  8. Bristow, Joseph, "The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona" (1987), Croom Helm
  9. Chadwick, Joseph, "A Blessing and a Curse: The Poetics of Privacy in Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'", Victorian Poetry, 24, pp.13~30 (1986)
  10. Ellmann, Richard, "Oscar Wilde" (1988), Alfred A. Knopf
  11. Fischler, Alan, "‘It Proves that Aestheticism Ought to Be Discarded’: W. S. Gilbert and the Poets of Patience", Nineteenth-Century Literature, 66, pp.355~382 (2011)
  12. Greenblatt, Stephen, "The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. 9th ed" (2012), Norton
  13. Kiberd, Declan, "Introduction, In Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Centenary Edition", pp.739~743 (1999), HaperCollins
  14. Raby, Peter, "The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde" (1997), Cambridge UP
  15. Schur, Owen, "Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms" (1989), Ohio State UP
  16. Skelton, Robin, "Celtic Contraries" (1990), Syracuse UP
  17. Smith, Philip, II, "Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde" (2003), MLA
  18. Woodbridge, Homer E., "Oscar Wilde as a Poet", Poet Lore, 19, pp.439~457 (1908)

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