ABSTRACT
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a remarkable document, not only as poem, but as historical record and indictment of primitive judicial system that betrayed its poets and children and even more its serious offenders by housing them all under same sadistic penal roof. Oscar Wilde spent two years of his short life in Reading Gaol for a crime that would not be considered a crime at all by today's standards. Wilde feared that the propaganda elements in the poem would ruin the pure poetic energy and momentum of his artistic creation but there is no doubt that the poem in its entirety packs an incredible aesthetic punch. This chapter suggests that a sense of betrayal was the creative engine that launched the poem, and that the emotional components of that psychological state need to be examined. A purely "aesthetic" poetry that ignored reality and fiddled while Rome burned would surely betray itself and the complexity of its humanistic mission.
