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Article: Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx"--a dramatic monologue of the dandy as a young man?(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Philological Quarterly
- Article date:
- September 22, 2004
- Author:
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With the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the occasional comment on "The Harlot's House," Oscar Wilde's poetic production has now been almost completely eclipsed by the tremendous academic and popular-culture attention given to his dramas, (1) to his eclectic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and to his fairy tales. Even his collection of essays and his tentative approaches to the literary theory of l'art pour l'art have, in the course of the recent decades, elicited more scholarly investigation than his erudite and myth-laden poetry, particularly his obscure poem "The Sphinx."
At first glance, "The Sphinx" seems to be just another sensational work of ...