Oscar Wilde , therefore, we should look for him not in a consistently maintained position but rather in phase along the trajectory between the modifying illusions of certainty and uncertainty, objective and subjective. He studied dandyism at Oxford during the interlude between Darwin and Freud, but Wilde began to see the poses of Victorianism as weak reflections of the life of art. And so he followed the logic of decadence to its self-destructive conclusion. In this as in many other things, Wilde was prematurely modern.
Born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin to a mother and father of distinguished accomplishments, Oscar Wilde was the second of three children. His older brother, William, preceded him in school and grew up to become a journalist. He died a year before Oscar. The third child, a younger sister, died in childhood. Wilde honored her memory with the poem "Requiescat," uncharacteristically objectivist, distinguished by unfeigned sentiment and admired by Yeats, who reprinted it in A Book of Irish Verse (1895). The character of his parents seems to have determined to an unusual degree the life and career of their genius son. Wilde at least thought so, and the question of influence, especially that of inherited characteristics and motives of behavior, became an important theme in his major prose and dramatic works, as it was, indeed, in the lives of his parents.
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