Portrait of Oscar W.

The Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde is famous for almost as many popular quotations as Mark Twain or Orwell. His late-Victorian world was peppered with all manner of dandyism and wise-crackery, captured perfectly in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. But his life was also colored by his homosexuality, closeted as it was with his wife and children, which eventually led to his imprisonment and death.

A fascinating artist, and now his trial will be the subject of a Modernism Seminar Lecture on Monday September 17:

"The Trial of Oscar Wilde," Kevin Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College. Part of a series of seminars on modernism led by professor Jed Rasula.

Professor Dettmar is also a popuar music critic who has written about Rock music and recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (2009), so this should be a good talk on Wilde's demise. Wilde's art of contrivance and conversation in his work is one of those unmatched achievements, frozen in time by its own glorious language. If you ever happen across The portrait of Mr. W.H., to which the title of this post faintly harkens, it's a wonderful yarn about the real source of inspiration for Shakespeare's sonnets that is well worth your time. 

Image: "The Peacock Skirt" illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé (1892), via Wikimedia Commons.