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A review by kurtwombat
De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
On an almost imperceptible scale, I can identify with the release of writing a well crafted sentence. DE PROFUNDIS was written mostly while Oscar Wilde was in prison—initially denied the ability to write, Wilde was suffocated by the words he couldn’t express. Ostensibly a letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (look up a picture of Douglas online and you will want to start slapping him and never stop), De Profundis becomes an explosion of Oscar Wilde’s heart and soul and mind. He emerges as a man largely transformed by his experience (the spoiled rich like himself that were sentenced to hard labor rarely survived their imprisonment). He doesn’t dismiss his past “sins”, instead the libertine excesses were necessary to get him to prison which was necessary to get him to a more enlightened state. Imprisoned partly because of his own arrogance and partly because of being under the spell of Douglass (again, keep slapping), Wilde weaves a narrative of his relationship with God and the inseparable link between religion and art—art as an expression of nature which is an expression of God. While occasionally redundant or hyperbolic, Wilde expresses his self-discovery with jaw dropping beauty. Eloquent and graceful, like looking at a vast lake where the water is so smooth and glass like it reflects a glorious sky without a flaw. I consider myself spiritual without being religious, but I was genuinely moved by several passages decrying our failures as people to aspire to the beauty of art and God. I don’t want to scare anyone off by making this sound like a born again pamphlet you’ll find stuck on your front door when you get home. It is not that at all. Instead it is a last blast of creative glory from a wildly talented writer—like a fireball flaring out before it falls into oblivion. This is Wilde’s last published prose—he would die a couple years after his release from prison.