How Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On “De Profundis”

Prison, it might be fair to say, demanded this sort of writing from Wilde. It forced him to change out the voice of a snobbish aesthete for that of a survivor, that of a sufferer, that of a jilted lover, that of a prophet, and—another Emersonian voice—that of an educator. “You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art,” Wilde tells Douglas in the letter’s lovestruck last sentence. “Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.”

From How Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On “De Profundis”