Poems: Lord Alfred Douglas

ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 English Renaissance in Art," "The Portrait of Mr. W H.," "The Truth of Masks," "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," "The Rise of Historical Criticism," and a fuller selection of poems. While this Oxford English Authors edition will serve splendidly as an introductory text, anyone seeking a fuller representation of Wilde's texts in a course or seminar should consider using the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde originally published by Collins and reissued in 1989 as a Perennial Library paperback (Harper & Row, $15.95). It is not complete (it does not contain Wilde's book reviews, journalism, or lectures such as "The English Renaissance," for example), but is comprehensive enough to remain a useful collection for extensive reading. Philip E. Smith Il University of Pittsburgh Poems: Lord Alfred Douglas Lord Alfred Douglas. "Two Loves" and Other Poems: A Selection. East Lansing, MI: Bennett and Kitchel, 1990. iv + 65 pp. $10.00 LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS will always be remembered as a significant annotation to the story of Oscar Wilde, but it is well to recall from time to time that he was a poet in his own right. This small but handsome edition of his major poems will be appreciated by those who, as the unidentified editor says, are connoisseurs of Douglas rather than scholars of Douglas. In all, there are only twenty poems included, most of them very short but also included is the "dramatic poem" "When the King Comes He Is Welcome." Douglas's copious, if at times extremely biased and unreliable, contributions to Wildean biographical materials are generally far better known to the literary student of the 1890s than are his poems. That his poetry has not fared well is due in part to the fact that his stormy relationship with Wilde (even after Wilde's death, if we consider the accusations and charges levelled at Wilde in the numerous autobiographies that appeared regularly during the four decades that Douglas survived Wilde) overshadowed his own rather meagre output of poems. And when one rereads the best of Douglas's poems, one realizes again just how much influence Wilde had on Douglas. Certainly, the more famous of his poems—"Two Loves," "The Dead Poet," "In Praise of Shame"—are either directly about Wilde or closely associated with Wilde 472 Book Reviews (one wonders how famous the last line of "Two Loves"—"I am the love that dare not speak its name"—would be had it not been quoted at Wilde's trial and had Wilde's defense of the love not been so eloquent). In the brief afterword on Douglas's poetic prowess, the editor addresses an issue raised by Douglas in his Without Apology (1938). Douglas contended that English poetry afforded two quite different lineages—that of Donne, Dryden, Byron, Browning, and Eliot, and that of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne. Douglas saw himself as belonging to the latter tradition, one marked by what the editor sums up as "grandiloquence" (in contrast to the "wit" of the other tradition). The editor claims, without persuasive argument, or even evidence, that Douglas partook of both traditions. I suppose one might make this claim of almost any English poet, but as I was rereading the poems, Douglas's debt to Keats and Swinburne was apparent in line after line, the affinity with Donne or Dryden perhaps evident in the commitment to form. No, if one likes Douglas's poetry, one likes it precisely because it is marked by the sensuality and dreamy vagueness that characterize so much of fin de siècle poetry. The extravagant imagery ("flame-flaked hair," flowers "stained with moonlight"), the preoccupation with the macabre (as in "The Image of Death"), the love-and-death equation (in the longish "When the King Comes He Is Welcome" Giovanni poisons himself and his lover Francisco and they die, aptly enough, in an impassioned embrace), the fascination with Catholicism ("Before a Crucifix"), unrequited love, homosexuality, bitterness cum melancholy—these are the characteristics of the aesthetes of the 1890s and these are what dominate all of Douglas's poems. If Douglas had a genuine talent as a poet, it was in making poems that so perfectly reflected his age: not...