In Excelsis

In 1924, Lord Alfred Douglas sat in Wormwood Scrubs serving six months for libel, having lost his case against Winston Churchill. There, in a cell, he wrote a sonnet sequence that deliberately echoes the title of his former lover Oscar Wilde's prison letter: where Wilde wrote 'De Profundis' (from the depths), Douglas titled his work 'In Excelsis' (in the highest). The sequence claims spiritual aspirations, but reading as a bitter retort to Wilde's devastating account of their relationship, it also repeats the antisemitic conspiracy theories that landed Douglas in court. The sonnets are simultaneously an attempt at transcendence and a document of wounded pride and enduring prejudice. For readers interested in the afterlives of the Wilde circle, the psychology of literary rivalry, or the dark byways of early twentieth-century British culture, this is a strange and unsettling artifact: a prison poetry sequence that inverts its predecessor's title while repeating its author's worst impulses.