Oscar Wilde wrote in almost every form available to him, but he first gained fame and notoriety as a poet. It was as a poet that he became one of the leading lights of the Aesthetic movement, and he continued to write verse to the end of his life—in fact the only major work Wilde published between his release from prison and his death was the long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” originally published under the pseudonym “C.3.3,” representing the number of his prison cell.

Those who only know Wilde as the witty author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray will see a different Wilde in these poems: by turns reflective, sensuous, romantic and devoutly religious, but always with Wilde’s unerring eye for a telling phrase and his commitment to the ideals of the aesthetic movement, to art and beauty for their own sake.