The Spectator

Review: Mr Oscar Wilde’s poems

The Spectator has never minced its words – as the young Wilde found out, aged 27

issue 07 July 2018
190 years of The Spectator
13 August 1881

The reading of this book fills us with alarm. It is evidently the work of a clever man, as well as of an educated man, but it is not only a book containing poems which ought never to have been conceived, still less published, but it is almost wholly without thoughts worthy of the name, entirely devoid of true passion, with very few vestiges even of genuine emotion, and constituted entirely out of sensuous images and pictures strung together often with...

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