Abstract

While Oscar Wilde's plays and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, enjoy great attention and popularity among scholars and the general public alike, his final work, the 654-line poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, remains under-appreciated, particularly as far as critics are concerned. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as “a manipulative emotional diatribe” in which Wilde “draws a singleminded, heavy-handed, linear sentimentality into every stanza.” While I acknowledge the ways in which the poem's humility of style and subject matter are uncharacteristic for Wilde, I reject the notion that Reading Gaol is simple, either in aesthetic or moral terms. Focusing on the poem's images of "filth," I show that Wilde's swan song is in fact a work of great power and subtlety that demands that we rethink key assumptions about Wilde and about the literary imagination itself.