Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
‘Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.’
Member rating:
(1 vote)
| Words:
| Submitted: Thu Jul 11 2002
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
'Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.' The study of the life and work of Oscar Wilde -the married homosexual, the Protestant Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist and Catholic sympathies- is characterised by his most famous literary device, the paradox, and nowhere is this more true than in his attitude to art. He was an aesthete who worshipped the cult of beauty and strove to live his life artistically yet he was unable to realise these high ideals in either his work or his life, inextricably linked as they were. Art was certainly the serious guiding principle in the life of Wilde the artist, but he compromised his aesthetic principles by his human inability to keep it, and thus himself, detached from serious ideas. On arriving in England, Wilde was initially seduced by the Oxford Aesthetes, who at that time...
To see the full version of this document, and 143,651 others
