Imported Poems

The paper is grinding slowly towards completion, much like train going uphill, it gets harder the farther along it travels.

So, given their comparable backgrounds but radically different personalities, what was it that garnered both such public attention and admiration as to warrant the label: celebrity? It certainly wasn’t their strict adherence to normative values but rather the charisma of the narcissist, the charm of the maniac. In fact, the characteristics of a manic episode and those of Narcissistic Personality Disorder are so similar, they can only be differentiated via secondary, biological co-traits: insomnia coupled with appetite disturbances, to name two, are unique to bipolar disorder.

Wilde‘s imperious hubris, which proved as irksome to critics and some peers as it was delightful and spellbinding to his audience, was merely a façade however, a subterfuge employed to hide the sensitive, emotionally infantile ego beneath it‘s surface. Like all brilliant narcissists, Wilde was an accomplished actor, but had become so lost in the part, he did not descry the extent of his insecurity, and when he did, he simply parodied it. His trenchant, flamboyant epigrams such as “I am so clever that sometimes I don‘t understand a single word of what I am saying,” “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others”, “Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities” and “I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordeau forgets that all sane people are idiots.” display an underlying shame and pessimism that is simultaneously lacquered with the gloss of fatuous if not supercilious self-mockery. Sardonic and cynical yet totally captivating and humorous, Wilde used his wit to play hide and seek with the public, at once revealing his hidden, secret self - the latent homosexual - behind a mask of patent heterosexual conformity to public opinion. In the words of Sam Vadkin, noted NPD specialist, “The narcissist is not attuned exclusively to his needs. On the contrary: he ignores them because many of them conflict with his ostensible omnipotence and omniscience. He does not put himself first – he puts his self last. He caters to the needs and wishes of everyone around him – because he craves their love and admiration. It is through their reactions that he acquires a sense of distinct self. In many ways he annuls himself – only to re-invent himself through the look of others. He is the person most insensitive to his true needs.”

With little to commend him physically - Wilde was a prodigious, somewhat corpulent gentleman with large but feminine features, an exaggerated head and long hair - he took refuge in his intellect (a “cerebral narcissist”), but did not entirely discount his person. Lacking the extraordinary, Byronic beauty that made the Lord as famous with the men as with the women - the Irish wit parried nature’s hostility with ostentatiously lurid garments, becoming the latest incarnation of the visual, objectified dandy, a “ clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that the others dress to live, he lives to dress. “ As Wilde himself once said, “One should either be a work of Art, or wear a work of Art.” Since Wilde lacked the aesthetic qualities to be a living work of art, he resigned himself to wearing it, a proclivity that he would eventually incorporate into his literary philosophy of Aestheticism.

Like Wilde, Byron’s celebrity was partly self-fashioned, but to attribute his stardom merely to a self-promoting marketing stratagem is to grossly misrepresent the power of Byron’s presence and personality. Indeed, his persona was so compelling as to warrant the ascription of supernatural powers to it; John Polidori, one-time physician to Lord Byron during the Villa Diodati days, would one day write “The Vampyre”, a short story based on Bryon and whose main character, Lord Ruthven, was borrowed from “Glenarvon” a thinly-veiled confessional novel by Lady Caroline Lamb. An aristocratic tomboy noted for her fondness for donning page uniforms, Caroline possessed a personality inverted to Byrons, something that proved irresistible to the poet, who was noted as having “an ambiguity of appearance and character…and a great deal of the woman about him: his tenderness, his temper, his caprice, his vanity,” with “essentially female” thinking, “impatient of any consecutive ratiocination.” Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron engaged in a notorious affair at the pinnacle of his career , and when in the end, as inevitably happened in all of Byron’s tempestuous affairs, he grew bored and scorned her, Caroline embarked on a campaign of revenge, writing “Glenarvon” as bitter homage to Byron’s treatment to her. Not surprisingly, when Byron and Polidori fell out, the doctor felt obliged to create his own tribute in the form of a supernatural masculine being who could not die, drank the blood of the living for sustenance, and regularly seduced and killed legions of women. Polidori’s obscure work would become the basis for Bram Stoker’s infamous “Dracula”, and in fact, the concept of the modern vampire - fascinating, beautiful, charming, intelligent, seductive - is little more than the mythological legacy of this 18th century poetic mastermind.