Bloomsbury Poetry Classics are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Although now famed cheifly as a playwright, Oscar Wilde started his career as a poet, winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1878. A disciple of Walter Pater his determinedly aesthetic affectations found their first literary expression in a book called Poems (1881). It was as a coming poet that he toured the United States in 1882. After his marriage two years later, Wilde for several years wrote prose, including one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it was not until the early 1890s that he began scoring his theatrical successes. Then came his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his imprisonment in 1895 for homosexual offences. Bankrupted and disgraced, Wilde on his release exiled himself in France and there wrote The Ballad of Reading Jail, now generally recognised as his sole poetic master-work. He died in Paris in 1900, aged 46.