Lives.

Firchau, Wandering Michilimackinac, c. 1970

He lives the poetry that he cannot write.

Oscar Wilde

Seriously.

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

Oscar Wilde, from "The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything"

Beauty.

Goodloe Harper Pennington, Portrait of Oscar Wilde at the Age of 27, 1884

In the case of handicraftsmen - the weaver, the potter, the smith - on their work are the traces of their hand. But it is not so with the painter; it is not so with the artist.

Art should have no sentiment about it but its beauty, no technique except what you cannot observe. One should be able to say of a picture not that it is "well painted," but that it is "not painted."

What is the difference between absolutely decorative art and a painting? Decorative art emphasises its material: imaginative art annihilates it. Tapestry shows its threads as part of its beauty: a picture annihilates its canvas: it shows nothing of it. Porcelain emphasises its glaze: water-colours reject the paper.

A picture has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy. That is the first truth about art that you must never lose sight of. A picture is a purely decorative thing.

Oscar Wilde, from his "Lecture to Art Students"

Happy Birthday, Wilde

The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

Oscar Wilde, born on this day in 1854

Never.

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it -- that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing -- an actor, a writer -- I am a person who does things -- I write, I act -- and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Stephen Fry

Absolution.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Choose.

I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!

Oscar Wilde

Exception.

There never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

Oscar Wilde, from "Lecture to Art Students"

Happy.

The Smiths, "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"

Spirit.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Oscar Wilde

Save.

Any new poem is rather like a little child who has been stationed with a large group of other small children in a playroom, where there are a limited number of toys and no adult supervision whatsoever. Those toys are the tricks, turns, and tropes of poetic language, Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.”

Harold Bloom

Sovereignty.

Carracci, Apostles around the Empty Sepulchre (detail), 1605

Beauty is a form of Genius -- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Live.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

Reveal.

Oneself.

Piranesi, Pantheon, 1763

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Oscar Wilde

Always.

Happy Birthday, Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born on this day in 1854.

HÉLAS!

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,

Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?

Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll

Scrawled over on some boyish holiday

With idle songs for pipe and virelay,

Which do but mar the secret of the whole.

Surely there was a time I might have trod

The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance

Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:

Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod

I did but touch the honey of romance—

And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

Oscar Wilde

Happy Birthday, Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born on this day in 1854.

MAGDALEN WALKS

The little white clouds are racing over the sky,

   And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,

   The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch

Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.

A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze,

   The odour of leaves, and of grass, and of newly upturned earth,

   The birds are singing for joy of the Spring's glad birth,

Hopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,

   And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,

   And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire

Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.

And the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love

   Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,

   And the gloom of the wych-elm's hollow is lit with the iris sheen

Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.

See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there,

   Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew,

   And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue!

The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.

Oscar Wilde

Taught.