0.1 Afterword  (Page 7/25)

The origins of the sphinx

The precise origins of The Sphinx are clouded in myth. While scholars generally agree that Wilde finished writing the poem in 1893, one year aftercontracting to publish it and one year prior to its eventual publication, there is considerable disagreement about when he began composing it. Many scholars nowaccept the view, first advanced in 1907 by Wilde’s bibliographer Christopher Millard (who published under the pseudonym “Stuart Mason”) and reiterated by himin 1914 (“Mason,” Bibliography , 398), that the poem was begun while Wilde was a student at Oxford, before his graduation in1878. The evidence upon which Millard based this view was twofold: the existence of a manuscript draft of lines 141-3 incorporating a cartoon by Wilde of agowned academic; and the fact that lines 17-18 of the poem, “While i have hardly seen/ some twenty summers cast their green in autumn’s gaudyliveries,” recur in Wilde’s Newdigate Prize-winning poem Ravenna , which he had read aloud at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theater in June 1878, nearly three months after submitting it to thePrize committee. For Millard, the fact that Ravenna contains no other instances of lines recurring in poems of indisputably later date is evidence that Wilde begancomposing The Sphinx before Ravenna . Millard’s evidence, it will be observed, is conjectural and thin—Wilde was a frequent visitor to Oxford in the late 1870sand early 1880s, so the cartoon could easily postdate his undergraduate years. But it has been endorsed by many scholars, including the poem’s most recenteditors, Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, who write “that the poem was begun during Wilde’s Oxford years can be inferred from a MS draft of lines 141-3, which alsocontains a cartoon sketch of a gowned professor” (Fong and Beckson, 305-6). Fong and Beckson also date to Wilde’s Oxford years the earliest surviving fair copyof the poem, written in Wilde’s hand on three folio sheets containing early versions of lines 1-44 and 73-106, as well as eleven pages of fragmentaryjottings that correspond closely to lines contained in the fair copy. Significantly, Fong and Beckson make no claims about dating based upon the lineshared with Ravenna , writing only that The Sphinx “echoes” the earlier poem (Fong and Beckson, 307).

Wilde’s executor and friend Robert Ross muddied the waters further in 1910 when he declared, in a prefatory Note to a new printingof the poem (without Ricketts’s decorations), that Wilde had told him that The Sphinx had been commenced during a trip to Paris in 1874 but that he (Ross) could not help thinking that Wilde’saccount of the poem’s origins was a “poetical licence” (Ross, vii). Wilde is known to have visited Paris in 1874, and this dating, which predates Wilde’sOxford years, has been accepted—though with some skepticism—by Wilde’s preeminent biographer, Richard Ellmann.

But if scholars are uncertain about the precise date Wilde began composing The Sphinx , there is widespread agreement that much of the poem was composed shortly after Wilde’syearlong lecture-tour of America had ended, during an extended visit Wilde made to Paris from January to April 1883. It is significant that Wilde turned to thepoem so swiftly once his tour commitments were over, and significant too that much of the poem was composed in Paris. Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza hadpreoccupied many French artists and poets ever since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798-1801), and Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, the two Frenchpoets most beloved by Wilde, had both written important sphinx poems. In the third of his “Spleen” poems, for instance, Baudelaire had written: