LONDON : Wilde in the Abbey
Oscar Wilde, the Irish wit, poet and dramatist, officially joins Britain’s literary establishment today when his name is etched into Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The author of the societal comedies “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and the poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was highly popular but rejected by audiences when he was convicted of homosexuality and jailed in London for four years.
After his release in 1897, he was declared bankrupt and lived in exile in Paris, where he died in 1900 at age 46. In Paris, as playwright George Bernard Shaw put it, Wilde maintained “an unconquerable gaiety of soul.”
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