“Literary Petty Larceny”: Plagiarism in Oscar Wilde’s Early Poetry

Abstract

“ L I T E R A R Y P E T T Y L A R C E N Y ” : P L A G I A R I S M IN O S C A R W I L D E ’ S E A R L Y P O E T R Y A V E R IL G ARD N ER Memorial University W h e n , in 1878, Oscar Wilde recited his Newdigate Prize poem, Ravenna, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, anyone who had read his poems already published in magazines might have felt an odd sense of déjà vu as he listened to some of the lines. In fact, many of them were direct quotations from, or only slightly adapted versions of lines in, earlier poems such as “Magdalen Walks,” “Sonnet on Approaching Italy,” “Urbs Sacra Aetema,” and “Rome Unvisited.” A neat example is provided by three lines near the beginning of Ravenna’s fifth section: Some startled bird, with fluttering wings and fleet, Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet, Like silver crowns, the pale narcissi lay. . . . If one changes “crowns” into “moons,” these lines are identical with lines 3-6 of “Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa,” published in July 1877. Wilde also made use in Ravenna of lines and phrases to be found in poems written by that time but not yet published, such as “The Grave of Keats,” “The Burden of Itys,” “The Garden of Eros,” and “Impression de Voyage.” In addition to copying himself in individual lines, Wilde adopted through­ out Ravenna a derivative style which entitles one to call the poem “aca­ demic.” The competence of Wilde’s performance is a second-hand compe­ tence; either because he had not yet developed a style of his own, or because he felt that the adjudicators would respond more favourably to one with which they were familiar, he imitates in many places the accents of eight­ eenth-century poetry. This imitation probably came the more easily to him because of the form, pentameter couplets, prescribed by the competition. Many of his couplets are strongly reminiscent, despite the Romantic flavour of the poem as a whole, of Augustan pastoral writing : Where flower and fruit to purple radiance blow, And like bright lamps the fabled apples glow. (21-22) E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , v ii i, i , March 1982 Some, though they deal in a kind of beauty which particularly appealed to Wilde, display a characteristically Augustan balance of words and phrases: Where the tall tower of Giotto seems to rise A marble lily under sapphire skies. (Section 3) So far, the borrowing revealed is not very reprehensible. One does not look for maturity in Ravenna any more than in Arnold’s Newdigate Prize poem “Cromwell,” or Tennyson’s early poem “Timbuctoo,” with which he won the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge. But a more serious charge — that of plagiarism — can be levelled at Poems (1881). When Wilde pre­ sented a copy of this to the Oxford Union, Oliver Elton was able to propose a motion, which was unanimously carried, that “it be not accepted”1 on the grounds that it was no more than a tissue of borrowings from “better known and more deservedly-reputed authors.” The volume is full of echoes, either “atmospheric” or specifically verbal, of earlier English poets, and not only Elton but reviewers in the Athenaeum and in Punch were quick to point out its indebtedness. As the Athenaeum reviewer said: “Imitation of previous writers goes far enough seriously to damage the claim to originality.”2 Wilde’s views about plagiarism appear to be rather confused. About his own borrowings he made two statements. One of these, “ I appropriate only what is already mine,”3 sounds merely high-handed. Its meaning is perhaps clarified by the other, a more considered pronouncement: “The only writers who have influenced me are Keats, Flaubert and Pater, and before I came across them I had already gone halfway to meet them.”4 In the sense that it suggests those writers who influenced...