Autograph letter by Oscar Wilde to Mrs Speed, née Keats

Oscar Wilde visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery, ‘the holiest place in Rome’, in April 1877, and prostrated himself on the grass before Keats’s grave. Shortly afterwards he wrote a sonnet to commemorate the occasion. Here, five years later, Wilde sends his sonnet to George Keats’s daughter, Emma Speed, in America. She had been in the audience during a lecture given by Wilde that year, in which he had quoted Keats’s sonnet ‘Blue! ’Tis the life of heaven, the domain’. Delighted, she showed Wilde some of her father’s papers, and later gave him the original manuscript of the sonnet. ‘What you have given me is more golden than gold’, Wilde writes, ‘more precious than any treasure this great country could yeald me, though the land be a network of railways, and each city a harbour for the galleys of the world.’

Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 (sender)

1882 March 21

1 sheet

manuscript

paper

eng

autographs (manuscripts)
letters (correspondence)

1882

Gift of Dallas Pratt, 1971.

KSH

Salone

FNG-7.39a