Oscar Wilde’s lecture in San Francisco on Irish Poets
As San Francisco was the only city in America where Wilde lectured four times, he needed an additional lecture to add to the three he was already giving, which were: The English Renaissance, its evolutionary successor The Decorative Arts, and his usual alternative The House Beautiful.
[See Lecture Titles for the development of Wilde’s lecture topics].
Wilde chose as his subject Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (referred to in some texts as The Irish Poets of ’48), an idea he had hinted at on St.Patrick’s Day in St.Paul, where he made a rare expression of Irish nationalist sentiment.
On that earlier occasion in St. Paul Wilde was called upon to give only an impromptu speech, and he talked in general terms about Irish achievement and how the English occupation had arrested, but not dimmed, the development of Irish art.
Now in San Francisco he created a full lecture1, in which he focused on an aspect of the arts closer to his knowledge and his mother’s heart: nineteenth century Irish poetry.
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