Wilde's life affected his work greatly and differently at different times in his life.

"Much of the life of Wilde is so bound up with his work as to be incapable of separate treatment."(-Arthur Ransom in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study: p.25). And Wilde himself said that "Drama is the meeting place of art and life" Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray illustrates how Wilde's life is bound together in his writings.

The story centers around three figures: and artist (Basil Hallward), his clever but impudent friend (Lord Henry Wotton), and a young, attractive, and impressionable man (Dorian Gray). Basil paints

Wilde uses Lord Henry (whom Wilde later declared to be a depiction of how the public perceived Wilde) to provide the corruptive theories and ideas. Throughout the book, Lord Henry utters clever aphorisms and paradoxes in Wilde's celebrated word play. Dorian becomes infatuated by Lord Henry and appears receptive to his theories and values. Readers soon see evidence of the corruptive influence of those theories and values in Dorian's behavior. Dorian becomes smitten by a young actress in a seedy theater. He returns with Basil and Lord Henry to watch her perform, but this time is disappointed by her acting. After the performance the actress declares to Dorian that he has helped her to see how false her world of acting is-the false world of the stage- and she declares her love for him. Dorian, however, spitefully dismissed her, claming that she has thrown away her artistic genius and poetic intellect. Now she "simply produce(s) no effect."

Wilde's earlier works, also his first works, his poems, were a little more light-hearted and didn't have so much of his scandalous life bound up within them. In his poems, Wilde avoided the overly autobiographical and confessional mode, yet they still mirrored his attitudes and travels towards his life. (Critical Survey of Poetry;2030) And he had already expressed his sense of guilt in ethical terms and with less self-knowledge. (Edward Roditi the Poems in Prose) "Wilde was and always remained quite a bad poet" Harold Bloom in his introduction in Modern Critical Views. The pulse of Wilde's writings was sin and the very nature of the wit in the Biblical Prose Poems illustrates Wilde's constant preoccupation with guilt and sin. Wild began his literary career as the editor of a Woman's periodical (Modern Critical Views:1), another piece of evidence that today would have been considered material on which to think someone homosexual, but back then, only considered mildly bizarre.

Although Wilde was famous for writing witty dialogue in his plays, and his essays having the same, the best of Wilde's writing is only a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him speak find it disappointing to read him. (Twentieth Century literary Criticism)

Wilde wrote a collection of Fairytales that were assumed to be perfectly adapted for a childish audience though they have always been more popular with adult readers.(Edward Roditi- "The poems in Prose") Perhaps Wilde wrote these Fairytales directed towards children because of his immature and boyish nature. Wilde was always fascinated with children, and attempted to write his collection of fairytales for children but approached them with an adult point of view rather than a child's.(Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: 3045) It was "literature which only pretends to be written for children but still uses many of the devices of adult thinking. In Wilde's writings, this adult imitation of childish thinking illustrates the attempt to overcome, by making a virtue of it, some deeply rooted awkwardness or sense of guilt as an artist. And While Wilde tried to overcome the same inhibitions, in other works by imitating the styles of translation or the

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