How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets

As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6). Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated. Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator. Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities. His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon

Art · Cultural phenomenon · Epistemology · Formative assessment · Humanities · Literature · Phenomenon · Poetry · Sociology · Classics · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · 19th century · Classicism in literature · Criticism and interpretation · English literature · History and criticism · oscar Wilde (1854-1900)