“I am the Love”: Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Problem of Personification.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

SPEAKER: Erik Gray,  Columbia University

The use of personification in English poetry decreased dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century. With at least one major exception: the concept of love continued to be not just personified but embodied throughout the century. Focusing on Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem “Two Loves” and the use made of it during the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, this talk explores the causes and consequences of love’s persistent tendency to be personified.

About the speaker

B.A., Cambridge (1994); Ph.D., Princeton (2000). Erik Gray specializes in poetry, particularly of nineteenth-century Britain. His books include The Art of Love Poetry (Oxford, 2018), Milton and the Victorians (Cornell, 2009), and The Poetry of Indifference, from the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (Massachusetts, 2005), as well as editions of Tennyson and Spenser. He has also published articles on a range of poets, including Homer, Virgil, Sidney, Milton, Pope, and Gray, in addition to Romantic and Victorian poets. For many years he has taught Columbia’s introduction to the English major (Literary Texts and Critical Methods), as well as lectures and seminars on nineteenth-century British literature and transhistorical courses on poetry.