Provides students of Wilde with texts of Wilde's 119 poems and poems in prose, together with the publishing history of each poem, locations of manuscripts, variants and emendations, and a detailed commentary on allusions and echoes, imagery, and points of biographical interest.

This volume of Poems and Poems in Prose inaugurates the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , which will for the first time provide students of Wilde with scholarly and textually accurate texts of his complete oeuvre. In it, Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson provide reliable texts of Wilde's 119 poems and poems in prose, including 21 never published in his lifetime, together with the publishing history of each poem, locations of manuscripts, all known variants and emendations, and a detailed commentary on allusions and echoes, imagery, and points of biographical interest. The introduction by Ian Small, co-general editor of the Complete Works, discusses the historical context in which Wilde wrote poetry and the conditions surrounding its publication.

The editorial apparatus is meticulous and exhaustive ... As ancillary evidence for Wilde's later importance as a major cultural phenomenon, they [the poems] will reward more serious attention from scholars than they have previously received, and to that end this edition will deservedly become a standard work