{"product_id":"de-profundis-isbn-9780679783213","title":"De Profundis","description":"Written from Wilde's prison cell at Reading Gaol to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas, \u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e explodes the conventions of the traditional love letter and offers a scathing indictment of Douglas's behavior, a mournful elegy for Wilde's own lost greatness, and an impassioned plea for reconciliation. At once a bracingly honest account of ruinous attachment and a profound meditation on human suffering, \u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e is a classic of gay literature. Richard Ellmann calls \u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e \"a love letter...One of the greatest, and the longest, ever written.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains newly commissioned notes.\"Displays the insight, honesty, and unself-conscious style of a great writer.\"\u003cbr\u003e--W. H. Auden\u003cb\u003eOscar Wilde\u003c\/b\u003e (1854–1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and playwright. His novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Picture of Dorian Gray\u003c\/i\u003e, brought him lasting recognition, and he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era with a series of witty social satires, including his masterpiece, \u003ci\u003eThe Importance of Being Earnest\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRichard Ellmann\u003c\/b\u003e, during a long and distinguished career, won international recognition as a scholar, teacher of English literature, critic, and biographer. His magisterial life of James Joyce has been widely acclaimed as the greatest literary biography of the century. Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1918. He studied at Yale and at Trinity College in Dublin. He taught at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Emory, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and Oxford, where he was Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College. His \u003ci\u003eJames Joyce\u003c\/i\u003e (National Book Award, 1959) was preceded by \u003ci\u003eYeats: The Man and the Masks \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Identity of Yeats\u003c\/i\u003e, and was followed by—among other greatly praised books—two volumes of Joyce letters, \u003ci\u003eEminent Domain\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eFour Dubliners\u003c\/i\u003e. Ellmann died in May 1987, in Oxford, soon after completing \u003ci\u003eOscar Wilde\u003c\/i\u003e, to which he had devoted some two decades of study, research, and writing.\u003cb\u003ePreface by Richard Ellmann\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e is a kind of dramatic monologue, which constantly questions and takes into account the silent recipient's supposed responses. Given the place where it was written, Wilde might have been expected to confess his guilt. Instead he refuses to admit that his past conduct with young men was guilty, and declares that the laws by which he was condemned were unjust. The closest he comes to the subject of homosexuality is to say, impenitently, that what the paradox was for him in the realm of thought, sexual deviation was in the realm of conduct. More than half of \u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e is taken up by his confession, not of his own sins, but of Bosie's. He evokes two striking images for that young man. One is his favorite passage from Agamemnon, about bringing up a lion's whelp inside one's house only to have it run amok. Aeschylus compared it to Helen, Wilde to Douglas. The other is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have no realization of Hamlet's tragedy, being \"the little cups that can hold so much and no more.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe main theme of self-recrimination is that he did not break with Bosie. But his letter is an attempt to restore relations. And while he admits to \"weakness,\" he explains the weakness as due to his affection, good nature, aversion to scenes, incapacity to bear resentment, and desire to keep life comely by ignoring what he considered trifles. His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was \"the spendthrift of my own genius.\" But he passes quickly over this defect, and those that attend it. Much of \u003ci\u003eDe Profundis\u003c\/i\u003e is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, he cannot withhold his admiration for what that image was. Elegy generates eulogy. He heightens the pinnacle from which he has fallen:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. . . . Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eContinued...\u003c\/i\u003ePreface by Richard Ellmann  \"Displays the insight, honesty, and unself-consciousstyle of a great writer.\" --W.H. Auden","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301728866533,"sku":"NP9780679783213","price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679783213.jpg?v=1767724811","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/de-profundis-isbn-9780679783213","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}