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With the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the occasional comment on "The Harlot's House," Oscar Wilde's poetic production has now been almost completely eclipsed by the tremendous academic and popular-culture attention given to his dramas,1 to his eclectic novel The Picture ofDonan Gray and to his fairy tales. Even his collection of essays and his tentative approaches to the literary theory of l'art pour l'art have, in the course of the recent decades, elicited more scholarly investigation than his erudite and myth-laden poetry, particularly his obscure poem "The Sphinx."
At first glance, "The Sphinx" seems to be just another sensational work of art taking advantage of the fin-de-siècle predilection for the grotesque, the monstrous and the gothic.2 The sphinx, like the vampire and many other chimerical creatures, can be counted among the stock-in-trade motifs of late nineteenth century literature and art invented to transgress the Victorian notions of reason and decorum. Thus the reader is led to believe that Wilde, in accordance with many decadent writers and artists, caters to the bizarre neo-Romantic taste for sensational images of misogynism. Up to now the few essays dealing with "The Sphinx"-according to Isobel Murray, "Wilde's best Decadent poem"3-have tended to concentrate on images of decadent morbidity while hardly any critic has acknowledged that Wilde's poem must be accorded a much more prominent, if not a key position in the writer's oeuvre. Focusing on the basic contradictions nineteenth-century aestheticism struggled to solve, it gives the attentive reader a shattering insight into the Utopian impracticability of dandyish life and is thus, more than any other piece of decadent art, a revealing comment on the illusoriness and deceptiveness offinde-siècle façades and masks.
Published in 1894, only one year prior to Wilde's downfall as a dandy,4 in a slim volume of forty-four unnumbered pages, with elaborate art nouveau illustrations by Charles Ricketts and a dedication to the French symbolist poet Marcel Schwob, the poem itself with its exquisite binding of white vellum stamped with gold leaf was to be more than just an exceptional and attention-riveting book: like the famous "Preface" to The Picture of Dorian Gray, it was meant to be a kind of self-sufficient manifesto against Victorian didacticism and utilitarian instruction. The additional fact that "The...