Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic of the Self: Art as Imaginative Self-Realization in De Profundis

In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde tries to make his audience aware of the incalculable possibilities inherent in the mystery of the self. He defines art as "the conversion of an idea into an image," and in this carefully constructed literary epistle, he attempts to see himself "in his real as in his ideal relations"—that is, as imaginatively or symbolically as possible.