AN ALLEGORICAL PLEA TO OSCAR WILDE
In Bohemia: A Masque
by Christian Gauss, the future Dean of Princeton University.
The fifth and final article of my Three Times Tried series featured the third appearance in 1899 of a sonnet by Oscar Wilde. On this occasion he presented it to a young man named Christian Frederick Gauss, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, who would eventually become Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton.
We saw how Gauss had incorporated his meetings with Wilde into a striking work titled In Bohemia: A Masque, first published in the literary monthly East and West in June 1900.
As the previous article only featured selections of the poem, it is worth presenting it in full here separately, for the record.
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