De Profundis and Other Prison Writings

'I have nothing to declare,' Wilde once told an American customs official, 'except my genius.' A good part of that genius is evident in the essays and poems included in this volume. There is the emotional genius of 'De Profundis', the long, introspective and often hostile letter he addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison. And there is the poetical genius of 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', in which Wilde's generous nature could movingly express for another's misery the sorrow he found it hard to express for his own. This collection contains, too, many examples of that humorous and epigrammic genius which captured the London theatre and which, by suddenly casting light from an unexpected angle, widened the bounds of truth.