170. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Wilde did not choose the title De Profundis. After composing his famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Reading Gaol in 1897, he gave it to his friend and literary executor Robert Ross, with a semi-serious suggestion for a title: Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (‘Letter: In Prison and in Chains’). Ross, however, ignored the suggestion, publishing it in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death, with the title De Profundis (‘from the depths’, an allusion to Psalm 130). Ross’s title stands in a long line of literary De Profundises. Baudelaire had tried one, as had Christina Rossetti (though they both were considerably briefer than Wilde’s); later on Dorothy Parker and CS Lewis had a go. One other note of titular interest is that in 1924 Douglas published his sonnet sequence In Excelsis (‘from the heights’). This was also written in prison — he got six months for libelling Churchill — and was intended to mirror Ross’s title.

Consulted:
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small, Russell Jackson (2005)

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