Imported Poems

Just as it is the nature of the bipolar to vacillate between two extremes, with the highest ecstasy followed by the lowest anguish, so it is the nature of celebrity to waiver, and in the blink of an eye, the cherished hero of the hoi polloi can turn victim of its scorn. Such was the case with Wilde, whose outrageous bravado proved to be his downfall just as much as it had once been his success. In an act that can only be described as obliquely suicidal, Wilde sued lifetime lover Lord Alfred Douglas‘, aka “Bosie”, father The Marquess of Queensberry for libel due to a calling card he left for Wilde on which were scribbled the following words: “To Oscar Wilde posing Sodomite.” Had Wilde been demurer, he would have simply thrown discarded it, but as it was, Queensberry had piqued his ego one too many times. Urged on by Bosie, whose resentment against his father often took the form of flaunting Oscar’s love in his face, Wilde went to court to silence Queensberry, but instead, became the target of his own prosecutorial case. Queensberry argued justification, and his lawyer Carson produced “fifteen separate accounts” of “soliciting more than twelve boys of whom ten were named, to commit sodomy”. The fact that it was Bosie who had lured Oscar into “rough trade”, and that “what seemed to characterize all Wilde’s affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them…they were already prostitutes,” did not come into play. After three separate trials, Wilde was sentenced to prison, where he spent two years before his release, at which time he moved to Paris, by then penurious, and died shortly thereafter.

Amidst his ruin, the most palpable and nagging question to ask is why Oscar did not drop the case against Queensberry. Certainly, his friend Frank Harris had accurately prognosticated the results, informing Wilde that he was destined to lose, and would be persecuted further by Queensberry if he did not flee the country. Each trial had offered the playwright ample opportunity to escape his condemnation and to start a new life in another location, where he could continue to write in relative safety, but Oscar had refused them all. Ellmann argues Wilde “thought it better to suffer in Athens than glory in Thebes” but perhaps the true answer lies in Oscar’s own pre-scripted ideal, that a great man - destined to historical immortality - needs suffer a great fall. He could not have simply faded away, like an evanescent vapor at sunrise: such mundane endings were simply too pedestrian for him.

If Wilde’s descent was catastrophic and immediate, Byron’s was a lifelong affair, his public rise to fame simultaneously accompanied by a private self-destructiveness that the poet continuously feared, and rightly so, would be discovered to his ruin. Shortly after the birth of their child in 1816, Annabella Byron, with newborn in hand, retreated to her mother’s house where she would remain, eventually requesting a legal separation and then a divorce. Under a delusion perhaps anticipated by his then habitual use of laudanum, Byron “prepared himself for accusations of cruelty, drunkenness and infidelity,” but these proved to be the least of his worries. Recently scorned Lady Caroline Lamb saw the perfect opportunity to serve up the cold dish of revenge, and spread rumors regarding those licentious proclivities Byron had indulged at Harrow and during his Mediterranean Trip to Greece. This obloquy along with Anabella’s deepest suspicions of incest with Augusta “struck at the very existence of Lord Byron as a member of society“. When Byron was made aware of the situation, he “became dreadfully agitated, saying he was ruined, and threatening to blow out his brains,” yet even in this state of turmoil Byron found time for a liaison with Claire Claremont, an affair that would produce a bastard child. He also managed to receive then obscure poet, Samuel Coleridge, at his Piccadilly Terrace, where he listened to the bard recite his unpublished poem, “Kubla Khan”, and praised him for his genius. Coleridge reciprocated, penning the following ironic words, a tribute to Byron’s supernatural attraction even amidst the worst of turmoil : “If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely believe him - so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw - his teeth so many stationary smiles - his eyes the open portals of the sun - things of light and for light - and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiment he is uttering”.

But for all his beauty Byron could not - or would not - redeem his reputation from the censorship of society. MacCarthy writes, “opinion in England had hardened against Byron. The hostility was all the more intense because of his former fame.” In a letter to Tom Moore, Mary Godfrey summed it up this way: “The world are loud against him and vote him a worthless profligate…he is completely lost in the opinion of the world; and I fear he is the sort of character never to make an effort to recover it. So I look on him as given up to every worthless excess for the rest of his life.” Byron himself, perhaps unconsciously bent on full-fledged self-destruction, only made matters worse by permitting publication of two poems wherein he masks marital resentment in maudlin nostalgia.

Although friend Hobhouse insists Byron was not forced to leave the country, public outcry left him little room to stay. He was ignored and scorned at parties, compared with the likes of Henry VIII, George III, Heliogabalus, Caligula, Epicurus, Apicius and Hero and abused. Byron himself noted, “the atrocious caprice - the unsupported - almost unasserted kind of hinted persecution and shrugging Conspiracy - of which I was attempted to be made the victim….they tried to expose me upon earth the same stigmat, which they said Jacopo is saddled with in hell.”

Friend Hobhouse feared homophobic violence or assassination. MacCarthy notes “The violence against Byron was a foretaste of the hatred that, at the end of the century, followed the sentencing of Oscar Wilde.”
In the end, Bryon chose self-exile over the public humiliation and condemnation (and possible prison sentence) endured by Wilde. He would spend the rest of his life wandering through Italy before taking up the Greece movement against Turkish oppression in Missolonghi; here he would fall victim to a fever and die, a foreigner in a foreign land.