Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Douglas compiled these poems in his late forties, looking back on a life that had already scandalized England and shaped literary history. Known in his youth as Oscar Wilde's lover and the author of 'Two Loves', the sonnet whose defense by Wilde became a pivotal moment in the 1895 trials that sent both men to prison, Douglas later distanced himself from the Uranian poetry of his early work. This collection gathers his shorter pieces on love, hatred, nature, religion, death, and the art of verse itself, chronologically arranged to trace an arc from passionate young poet to a man at peace with his past. The absence of 'Two Loves' is itself a statement: a deliberate refusal to let the poem that made him notorious define his legacy. For readers drawn to the tangled relationship between art and scandal, between the man Wilde loved and the man he became, these poems offer an unexpected intimacy, the voice of someone who lived through infamy and returned, decades later, to speak quietly of other things.