Richard Henry Wilde | Biography

Richard Henry Wilde is remembered today chiefly for one poem, "The Lament of the Captive," often called "My Life is Like the Summer Rose." Writing in the tradition of southern romanticism, he composed lyrics on typical subjects: love, the adoration of woman, nature. He had various scholarly interests; for instance, he wrote on literary piracy and the need for an international copyright law. His chief scholarly and critical interests, though, were related to Italy. He wrote an article about the discovery of a portrait of Dante, attributed in Wilde's time to Giotto, and he wanted Congress to purchase a distinguished Italian library. Three of his four chief scholarly writings treat poets of the Italian Renaissance.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, to Richard and Mary Newitt Wilde, Richard Henry Wilde came to America with his family in 1796. They settled in Baltimore, and six years later Wilde's father died, having lost most of his wealth during the Irish Rebellion. In 1802 and 1803 Mary Wilde's family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she opened a dry goods store two years later. Educated at home by his mother and private tutors, Wilde began preparing for a career in law in 1808 and passed the Georgia and the South Carolina bars in 1809. By 1811 he had become attorney general for his Georgia district, and he was elected a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1815 to 1817. Wilde married Caroline Buckle in 1819. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy. Wilde's wife died in 1827, two years after he was reelected to the House. After being defeated politically in 1835, he left the United States for Italy and became a professional scholar. He returned in 1841.

Wilde's outstanding published scholarly work is Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (1842). Under mysterious circumstances, the sixteenth-century Italian poet, Tasso, author of the epic Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme Liberata, 1575), was imprisoned for being mad, but eventually released. Wilde's work is not a biography; rather, the entire focus is on the reason for Tasso's madness and imprisonment. Like a lawyer, Wilde carefully and in detail presents the documents dealing with the imprisonment. Closely analyzing the circumstantial evidence, he conjectures that Tasso loved Leonora d'Este, far above him in prestige and power, and that she loved him in return. Because he was loving above his station, Wilde reasons, he was imprisoned; to avoid torture or death, he feigned madness. In his critical approach to the problem, Wilde relies on autobiographical elements. He hopes to settle the controversy by going to Tasso's own writings. He believes that this approach is legitimate because poets do write about their own lives in their works. Wilde also demonstrates a historical relativist's vision, pointing out that while some readers might object to the morality of Tasso's writings, they should remember that the poet belonged to a different age with its own morality.

"The Italian Lyric Poets," sometimes called "Specimens of Italian Lyric Poetry," also written while Wilde was in Italy, has never been published in its entirety. The lengthy manuscript, consisting of two parts, contains biographical introductions to a number of poets together with translations of some of their poems; the original Italian of the poems is also included. Wilde translated all the pieces and wrote many of the introductions; however, some of the introductions were completed by his son William Cumming Wilde. The longest biographical introductions are on Francesco Petrarch (133 pages), Giovanni Boccaccio (148 pages), and Tasso (36 pages). There are translations of thirty poems by Tasso (all had appeared in the earlier work), fifteen by Petrarch, four by Boccaccio, three each by Dante Alighieri, Francesco da Lemene, and Giovanni Battista Felice Zappi. There are one or two translations of poems by twenty-eight other poets. In all, there are ninety-six translations.

Although the introductions in general are straightforward biographical accounts, occasionally there are references to critical concerns. For example, in the biographical introduction to Petrarch, Wilde evaluates the Italian poet as "the restorer of learning, the creator of a new poetry, the beautifier of a language which is all melody." Again, just as in the case of Tasso, he supports the idea of looking in the work for autobiographical elements: he believes that a poet presents his own personal passions. For example, in the crucial matter of whether Petrarch's Laura was a real or an imagined person, Wilde concludes that she was real, and "it may be possible from his own verses, to trace, at least in outline, the story of his love." Also in this essay the subject of the morality of the times appears, particularly in reference to Boccaccio's Decameron. This work, Wilde insists, must be viewed from the standpoint of its own time and place; then it becomes less shocking.

"The Italian Lyric Poets" led into Wilde's next project, "The Life and Times of Dante, with Sketches of the State of Florence, and of his Friends and Enemies." Wilde, disturbed by certain obscurities and contradictions in the available biographies of Dante, determined to explore these questions on his own. He gained access to the appropriate archives and studied them with intense interest, reading manuscripts and also printed books. The work he wrote on Dante was dedicated "To the People of Italy." Only one volume of the proposed two-volume edition was completed; it contains 678 manuscript pages. Book one of the first volume deals with Italy in general, and there are chapters dealing with Italy in the age of Dante, religion, government, the artistocracy, morality, the city of Florence, and the biographers of Dante. Book two of volume one treats Dante's life until his exile. Enthusiastic about this study, he revised constantly, saying that he had changed every line fifteen or twenty times because by this work he hoped to be remembered as an author.

Despite his efforts on the Dante manuscript, the long work by Wilde that has attracted the most attention is the full-length poem Hesperia. As early as 1827 Wilde had contemplated a poem on a grand scale about America and had written a few passages. However, the final form was not published until 1867, twenty years after his death. The poem was incomplete at his death, and his son William Cumming Wilde added some necessary notes and saw the work through publication. The poem is divided into four parts, each referring to a section of America: Florida, Virginia, Acadia, and Louisiana. Wilde uses the word Hesperia in a special sense to mean all of America. The work has descriptions of numerous places, as well as accounts of episodes in American history. The dedication, "Alla Nobillissima Dama, La Signora Marchesa Manfredina Di Cosenza," has aroused considerable scholarly interest. In Hesperia, much of which was written in Italy, the poet, using the pseudonym Fitzhugh De Lancy, remembers when he first met the Marchesa and when they parted. He writes this poem which will reach her from the grave, telling of his love that he never openly expressed while alive.

Hesperia, which shows the romantic concern for the use of American settings and the poet's searching for materials suitable for poetry, contains numerous critical comments. In the important preface, composed in Palermo, Wilde states that personal experience is essential to the poet. The author must write about what he has seen and felt. Unfortunately, "modern life, in America especially, is utterly commonplace. It wants the objects and events which are essential to poetry,--excludes all romance, and admits but one enthusiasm." Like many other poets, Wilde laments his "own want of invention." Nature by itself, he declares, is insufficient for inspiration no matter how beautiful. It is essential that historical associations become a part of that nature: scenery must be invested with "historical or legendary lore." Wilde goes on to say that though America has little poetry of any importance, at least in prose Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper made an effort to add historical and legendary qualities to nature; poets must follow their lead.

In 1841, with little money left, Wilde was forced to give up his scholarly pursuits, and he returned to America. He moved to Louisiana in 1843, assuming again the practice of law. Declaring that literature cannot live in an atmosphere of commerce and believing that composing poetry did no good to his legal reputation, he gave up his scholarly activities. He consoled himself with an active social life in New Orleans and even aided in some community projects, such as the establishment of the law school at Tulane. And he had pleasant memories; he had experienced a kind of paradise in Italy and would always remain a "child in heart" of that country. He died during a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans in 1847.