ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde identified the gothic style with suffering and denial, and the style of the Renaissance with affirmation and joy. Among moderns worth keeping, Wilde just makes the cut, dying as the twentieth century began. In The Crown of Wild Olive, a moving attack on the acquisitive society, John Ruskin converted Wilde to Socialism. But Wilde's Socialism, unlike Ruskin's, was inspired as much by his distaste for the million as it was by fellow feeling for the poor. Wilde's poems are made of paste and he judged them: In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. All Wilde's comedies are indebted to the new technical realism. But Wilde feared the singularity in his elegant purveyors of wit. Wilde sought to return to the high artifice of the drama in its salad days: stichomythia, the poetry of wit.
