![]() Actually, I think Murray’s original estimate of Alfred Douglas’s sonnets was absolutely right they vary in quality, but as he said, at their best they equalled the poets he most venerated. In practice this could mean 14-year-old boys, even younger, at a time when he and Wilde had reunited following Wilde’s release from prison. Looking back now on his precocious work, he thinks he overdid a little his enthusiasm for Douglas’s poetry, understated his toxic anti-Semitism and didn’t quite do justice to the pederastic element of his early sexuality – as Bosie preferred to put it, his tastes were for youth and softness. Twenty years after it was first written, Douglas Murray has reissued his fine biography of Bosie: his first book, written in his gap year before he went to Oxford. There were literary critics in Douglas’s day who compared him to Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets ![]() Instead the boy survived until 1945, worn, lonely and poverty-stricken, his looks withered, his nose pinched, contemptuous of modernity, but still with a redemptive, blistering integrity. That golden Alfred Douglas survives in the famous photograph on the front of Douglas Murray’s book, with Wilde sitting near Bosie, his arm extended behind the boy with something like possessiveness. Had he died when he was still beautiful and youthful looking, he would have remained forever the gilded youth Oscar Wilde loved. It would probably have been better for Lord Alfred Douglas to have died young.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |