|
|
Article: Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol.' (Oscar Wilde)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- March 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
It is surprising that the influence of Dante's Inferno on Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol has not yet been noted, especially since the poem's debt to Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Thomas Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer, and the poetry of A. E. Housman has been discussed extensively by many critics. And yet Dante's influence is not incidental but pervasive. Richard Ellmann states the Ballad's basic theme compactly: "The poem has a divided theme: the cruelty of the doomed murderer's crime, the insistence that such cruelty is pervasive; and the greater cruelty of his punishment by a guilty society."(1) This divided aim is not limited to theme ...
Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:
|
|
Article: IT'S NO `READING GAOL.' IT'S NOT EVEN `RIOT IN CELL ...
The Boston Globe;
August 10, 2003 ;
700+ words
...Next to the great prison accounts in literature - Oscar Wilde, Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn - we now have Jeffrey Archer. Last month Archer was released from jail after serving two years of a four-year sentence; his American readers, who are nearly as legion as they are in
|
|