Imported Poems

Here's the next installment. Remember that shirt I designed? Well, it's garnered all sorts of attention. I have total strangers coming up to me, remarking on it and asking me where / how I did it - LOL.

Being shy, I'm almost afraid to wear it again lest I turn red and grow more embarrassed.

These perspectives and experiences, thrust upon such tractable young souls, helped produce a narcissistic self-love in Oscar Wilde and a nostalgic longing for boyhood in Byron, who would later idealize his years at Harrow as an ideal time, rife with passionate friendships, which were the natural consequent of Greek ideals in action. As a result, both literary figures entered manhood teeming with contradictory desires, mood dysphoria and an underlying insecurity, which with some self-awareness they used to construct the foundation of their public charismatic personas, ultimately the very creation which enslaved them and led to their disgrace.
Both Byron’s and Wilde’s matriculation proved embarrassing due to culture clash between school atmosphere and personal background. J.E.C. Bodley, a one-time friend to Wilde during his Oxford days, said Wilde was “naïve, embarrassed, had a convulsive laugh, a lisp and an Irish accent.” Similarly Byron, though the sole nobleman of freshman year, “arrived at seventeen, still gauche and immature…and left at almost twenty, a poet of growing reputation.” In response to this initial awkwardness, Wilde worked to develop a polished demeanor, eradicating his Irish brogue so completely that he often spoke with a London accent purer than many of his native-born peers. He also looked to Byron as a source of inspiration for fashioning himself into a charismatic and compelling personality: “Visually the young Oscar modeled himself on Byron. A series of photographs…depicts the poet in knee breeches and black velvet jacket reclining luxuriously on a fur rug placed on an eastern carpet. Wilde too knew very well how to manipulate his image: ‘I give sittings to artists, and generally behave as I always have behaved - dreadfully.’ Wilde like Byron understood, and had reason to regret, that nothing succeeds like celebrity.” In addition to mimicking the romantic bard’s dress, he also capitalized on Byronic eccentricities and flamboyant behavior, choosing to have himself photographed in Greek costume while on a trip to Greece, perhaps a tribute to the Albanian one Byron wore in a portrait painted as a homage to his Mediterranean trip. Likewise, he wore lilac shirts and embellished his room with lilies, two behaviors vaguely reminiscent of Byron’s fondness for donning black and his reputation for keeping a bear on his college premises. Without a clear, defining personality of his own, young Oscar appears to have adopted Byron’s, merging it with his mothers to create a new persona in keeping with the times.
While Oscar’s efforts were predominantly successful - his charming, eccentric and wittily egocentric disposition earning him numerous speaking opportunities both within Britain and abroad - Byron’s were met with intermittent failure due to an authentic, turbulent nature that resisted suppression. The young lord’s “violent passion” - words he often used to describe his own emotions - were responsible for both his brilliant poetry and for the deviant and socially unacceptable behavior that occasionally erupted from below the constrained, placid surface.
Although Byron’s reputation portrayed him as an almost mythological, romantic hero, he usually failed to live up to the romantic standards he set forth in his verse, perhaps due to the traumatic experience he suffered as a child at the hands of his nurse, May Gray. Hired to help treat Byron’s lame leg when he was 9 years old, Gray in fact not only neglected him, but abused him as well: “She had treated him with cruelty.( p22) When Byron was nine years old, at his mother’s house, a free girl used to come to bed with him and play tricks with his person.” But wanton molestation was not all Byron suffered. The combination of her deceitful, nocturnal activities coupled with her strident hyper-Calvinism created a rift in Byron’s mind that he was never able to surmount: “The May Gray episode had important repercussions. Byron’s nurse was ostentatiously religious, and the coexistence of pious Bible study and lascivious behavior sharpened his awareness of hypocrisy and cant, deepening his scorn of false religious religiosity and over-zealous Calvinism in particular.<snip> The memories of female dominance, the large nurse in the small bed, affected his later attitudes to sex with women. Byron found a mature woman a complicated structure, threateningly flabby. He preferred the physique of young teenage boys, or the girls dressed as boys that became a feature of his early days in London.”
Throughout his college days, Byron’s developing “romantic suitor” persona would be macerated with rumors of infidelity, coldness and homosexuality, with alternating patterns of wooing, then scorning beautiful women, seducing his female servants, and copulating with younger if not socially inferior boys. Meanwhile, his views on religion, while superficially agnostic - betrayed a deep-rooted conviction that he was reprobate, or eternally condemned to Hell by God. Underneath his idealistic, aristocratic mask, an inveterate self-hate brewed, an overweening passion that would eventually send him head-long into despair and consequently destruction.