Has learnt to sigh save like a lover's.As we make historic progress on the dignity and equality of human love, it’s hard to forget the enormous indignities to which the lovers of yore have been subjected across the 4,000-year history of persecuting desire. Young animals, young flowers, they live and grow,Īnd die before their sweet emblossomed breath Their green unthought, or gives their licence pause Man-made for man, no mouthing prudence numbs Of young soft things, and all the harvestingīy Beauty that is thrall to Death no grace, The virginal snowdrop, and the dove that knows Tremulous betwixt the summer and the spring : In his own garden takes each delicate thing Of tenderest life, and being a delicate god, Of silver flute, and mellow half-heard horn,Ĭoming like Love, takes all things in the morn Of ten-stringed lute, and most mellifluous breath That I wot of, whereon the whole year round He died on March 20, 1945, following a heart attack. He produced his Autobiography during this time, several versions of his collected poems, occasional verse, and in 1940, his most judicious account of his life's central experience, Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up. There he turned again to poetry, but his prison writing, a sonnet sequence, was called In Excelsis.ĭouglas spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life quietly, living in Hove or Brighton on allowances provided by his mother and wife. He spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs prison. Editorially, however, it was nonliterary and virulently antisemitic, simply a forum for Douglas's considerable collection of bigotries.ĭouglas's intemperate expression of his views led to his arrest and conviction for writing and publishing a pamphlet libeling Winston Churchill. Douglas revived The Academy in 19 as Plain English, and the journal had a mild commercial success. Crosland, who in fact, ghost-wrote most of Oscar Wilde and Myself. By his own account, Douglas remained celibate thereafter.įrom 1907 to 1910, Douglas edited the journal The Academy, assisted by the obnoxious T. Douglas converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911, and he and his wife separated two years later.
Soon after Wilde's death, Douglas renounced his homosexuality he married Olive Custance in 1902, and they had a son, Raymond.
#Lord alfred douglas full#
When the full text of De Profundis was made public in 1913, Douglas responded with Oscar Wilde and Myself, repudiating Wilde and his works. In prison, Wilde wrote a long and bitter epistle later titled De Profundis, accusing Douglas of betraying their friendship.
#Lord alfred douglas trial#
His first trial resulted in a hung jury, but at the second Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years' hard labor.Īlthough Douglas and Wilde remained close until the latter's death in 1900, the scandal generated a sheaf of spiteful documents. At the trial, Queensberry was found not guilty and a warrant was promptly issued for Wilde's arrest. In 1895, Douglas's father accused Oscar Wilde of "posing as a sodomite," whereupon Wilde (at Bosie's urging) sued him for libel. Some of these poems appeared in a French edition of Douglas's verse in 1896, but most were not republished until the Sonnets and Lyrics of 1935, and then, at least in the sonnet mentioned, with the homosexual content revised out. Poems like "Hymn to Physical Beauty" (with a nod to Shelley), the sonnet "In an Aegean Port," and most famously "Two Loves," one of whom concludes the poem by sighing "I am the Love that dare not speak its name" are typical in their wistful tone. Most of Douglas's homoerotic poetry was written between 18 and appeared in undergraduate literary journals such as The Spirit Lamp, which he edited, and The Chameleon, or in small-circulation magazines like The Artist. Douglas's beauty was "like a narcissus-white and gold," as Wilde told Robert Ross. He met Oscar Wilde through a mutual friend in early summer, 1891, and they became lovers the following spring. Lord Alfred Douglas is remembered today for his tumultuous association with Oscar Wilde and as a minor poet.ĭouglas, universally known as Bosie, was born October 22, 1870, the third son of John Sholto Douglas, ninth Marquess of Queensberry, and Sibyl, née Montgomery.Īfter a boyhood during which his parents separated, Douglas went up from Winchester to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1889.
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