DE Weekly: Aestheticism, Wilde, & The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return’d to me, And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell.’” This poem from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is repeated in a film I watched this past week, the 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The poem is read throughout the movie by the film’s namesake, Dorian Gray. Sitting for a portrait painted by his friend Basil Hallward, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a man who lives only for pleasure, and suggests to Dorian that men should pursue only their sensual pleasures.