Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills ( 1854 – 1900 ),born in Dublin, the son of Sir William Wilde , Irish surgeon , and Jane Francesca Elgee , well known as writer and literary hostess under the pen-name ‘Speranza’. A brilliant classical scholar, Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’. His flamboyant aestheticism attracted attention, much of it hostile; he scorned sport, collected blue china and peacock's feathers, and proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater and the cult of ‘art for art's sake’ mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience ( 1881 ). Wilde successfully lived up to the image of the satire, and its impetus took him on a lecture tour of the United States in 1882 , after the publication of his first volume of Poems ( 1881 ). In 1883 he attended the first night of his...
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