De Profundis

“The day will come when the truth must be revealed—perhaps not in my lifetime… but I am not prepared to remain forever at the grotesque pillory to which I have been placed,” Oscar Wilde wrote to his friend Robert Ross, handing over the manuscript that would later become known as “De Profundis.” He wrote this enormous epistle in Reading Prison, where he was serving a sentence for “a love that dares not be named.” So writes Alfred Douglas in one of his poems, whose passionate friendship was Wilde’s undoing and led to his imprisonment. In Victorian society, this phrase was a euphemism for a kind of relationship that was bigger and broader than friendship. It is precisely about such unbridled passion that Oscar Wilde confides in “De Profundis,” indicating who Alfred Douglas was for him, what this destructive love had become, and what an artist is willing to sacrifice for the sake of expressing himself in creation.