Oscar Wilde had a vision for art that I neither share nor approve of, and yet I respect it and I do not believe it can entrely keep him from being a good poet.  Oscar Wilde was a poet and novelist who helped start the aesthetic movement at the end of the Victorian period.  This movement was a direct response the Victorian period ideals, just as Romanticism is a response to Realism and vice versa.  It is hardly adequate to mention one without the other, for they feed off eachother in the strange sense that they directly contradict eachother.  And so it is hardly fair for me to present his ideas as only something I disagree with, and yet I want to keep this short so I will delve only into what the man himself said.

In his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes;
     "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
     Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all."
This veiw I can't help but find entirely flawed.  Books are written by people, and people believe in one moral or another, whether that moral be the fact that there are no morals.  The author's preference for their moral will tend to show up in what they write, and so their work, or part of their work, is based on morality.  This basis, and whether it is flawed or not, is exactly what makes a book moral or immoral.  Any immoral action betrayed as a moral action in a work makes that work immoral-- this does not mean it happens very often, but it does mean it happens.  Another thing Oscar wrote in his preface was;
     "No artist has ethical sympathies.  An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."
If this ideal were true, then Oscar's view on the morality of books would be quite unflawed.  However, it is not only untrue, but it is a disgraceful ideal to take on.  He is asking that an artist, a human being, have no morals.

I, for one, do not agree with this simply because I believe morality exists.  His veiws hold a certain undeniable appeal, where it is only the quality of the writing that makes a good or bad book, but they are unreachable and otherwise undesireable.  Why, then, do I quote this artist I so disagree with?  Because once I disregarded his veiws of artistry, his artistry itself was inspiring and beautiful.  Poetry expresses emotions, and so it is very hard for a poem to be immoral even if the artist is-- that is, I found, despite his theories, that the poem I quoted was not immoral and therefore something I did not feel ashamed associating myself with, as long as I put this very disclamer up.

~Ketlin Narris