Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of novelist, poet, and playwright Oscar Wilde, who was one of the most popular playwrights in London during the early 1890s and became the target of a criminal prosecution involving his homosexuality. Wilde is most well-known for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and for his plays Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Ernest.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854. He was the second of three children. Wilde‘s mother was a poet and a supporter of the Irish nationalist movement. His father was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon. He was also a renowned philanthropist, who was knighted for his service as a health adviser for the nation and also wrote books about Irish archeology and peasant folklore.

Wilde was educated at home, until the age of nine, by a French nursemaid and German governess who taught him their languages. In 1864, Wilde entered the Portora Royal School in Northern Ireland, where he studied for seven years, and was regarded as a prodigy for his ability to speed read. Wilde was able to read two pages simultaneously and could consume a three-volume book in 30 minutes.

In 1871, Wilde won a scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin, where he studied literature and the classics for three years. During this time Wilde established himself as an outstanding student. He was first in his class in his freshman year, and he began publishing poems in magazines.

During Wilde’s second year, he was elected as one of the Scholars of Trinity College, which was described as “the most prestigious undergraduate award in the country.” In his final year, he won the university’s highest academic award, the Berkely Gold Medal in Greek. Wilde was then awarded a scholarship to Magdalen College in Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878.

At Magdalen College Wilde wore his hair long, and became a Freemason. He also developed an interest in Catholicism, and he became widely known for his role in the Decadent Movement. The Decadent Movement was an artistic and literary trend that was characterized by a belief in the superiority of fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world.

In 1878, Wilde won the Newdigate Prize from the University of Oxford for his poem Ravenna, which was about his time in Oxford. That same year he graduated with a degree in the classics from Magdalen College and returned to Dublin, where he regularly attended theater performances.

In 1880, Wilde completed his first play, Vera; or The Nihilists, which is a tragedy set in Russia, and loosely based on the life of writer and social activist Vera Zasulich. A year later arrangements were made for it to be performed in London, but the production was canceled, due to political reasons. The first performance was in 1883 in New York, although it wasn’t a success and folded after just a week.

In 1881, Wilde published a collection of his poetry titled Poems, which sold out the first print run of 750 copies, although it wasn’t generally well received by critics, and the Oxford Union condemned the book for alleged plagiarism. Nonetheless, it had further printings, and Wilde presented many copies of the book to the dignitaries and writers who received him during his later lecture tours.

In 1883, Wilde visited Paris, where he wrote a five-act tragedy titled The Duchess of Padua, which was turned down by the actress it was written for and abandoned until 1891 when it was performed on Broadway in New York, but only ran for three weeks.

In 1890, Wilde published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a philosophical story about someone who sells his soul in exchange for lasting youth, so that a portrait of him ages and fades rather than his physical appearance. The book was controversial when it was first published. Many critics felt that it was not only poorly written but “vulgar” and had a “superficial view of beauty,” although today it is largely considered to be a seminal work in literature and a timeless classic.

In 1891, Wilde finished his drama Salome but was met with a refusal for it to be performed in England at the time, due to a prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. However, Wilde produced a sequence of four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights in London and defined his legacy.

In 1892, Wilde completed a social satire titled Lady Windermere’s Fan, which is about a woman who suspects that her husband is having an affair, and it ran for 197 performances that year. In 1893, this was followed by A Woman of No Importance, which satirizes English upper-class society and ran for 113 performances. In 1895, An Ideal Husband was released, which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and it ran for 124 performances.

That same year, The Importance of Being Ernest was released, which became one of his most celebrated works. This play was an exaggerated comedy about someone who maintains a fictitious persona to escape burdensome social obligations. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde’s career, the height of his fame and success, but also heralded his downfall. The Marquees of Queensberry, whose gay son Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde’s lover, planned to present the writer with a bouquet of rotten vegetables to disrupt the show. However, Wilde was tipped off about his plans, and Queensberry was refused admission to the theater.

This angered Queensberry, who publicly accused Wilde of illegal homosexual acts. This allegation got Queensberry arrested for criminal libel, a charge with a possible sentence of two years in prison. However, Queensberry was able to avoid conviction for this if he could demonstrate that his accusation was true, so he hired private detectives to find evidence of Wilde’s gay liaisons.

Wilde’s friends warned him that this was a serious situation and that he should flee to France, but he didn’t heed their advice. When the case went to trial, Wilde’s private life, and his associations with male prostitutes in brothels, became public knowledge and began to appear in the press. Queensberry was acquitted after the trial, and Wilde had incurred considerable expenses in his defense, which left him bankrupt.

However, the worst was yet to come. After Wilde left the court, a warrant for his arrest was issued for the charges of “sodomy” and “gross indecency,” and soon thereafter he was arrested. Wilde was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labor, and his notoriety caused his play The Importance of Being Ernest to be closed after 86 performances.

In 1897, Wilde was released from prison, bankrupt and embittered. He moved to France and never returned to the United Kingdom again. The following year Wilde wrote his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which was his last published work, and is an eloquent plea for the reform of prison conditions.

Wilde died in 1900 in Paris, at the age of 46, of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, Wilde was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he had admired since his time in college. He is buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Paris. Wilde wrote a total of nine plays and 43 poems during his lifetime.

In 1995, Wilde was commemorated with a stained-glass window at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, London. In 2014, Wilde was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields.” In 2017, Wilde was among around 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered criminal offenses in England.

Some of the quotes that Oscar Wilde is known for include:

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

by David Jay Brown

Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of Italian poet, writer, and philosopher Dante Alighieri, who is best known for his epic work The Divine Comedy, which is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages, and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and he is considered to be one of the Western world’s greatest literary icons.

Dante Alighieri was born in the Republic of Florence, in what is now Italy, around 1265, although the exact year of his birth isn’t known. Dante’s family descended from the ancient Romans. His mother died when he was nine years old, and his father remarried a woman who brought him a half-brother and half-sister.

It is believed that Dante was educated at home, or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. He studied Tuscan poetry, and he admired the compositions of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli. Dante also studied the poetry of the French troubadours and Latin writers of antiquity.

At the age of nine, Dante met a girl one year younger than himself named Beatrice Portinari, whom he claimed to have fallen in love with “at first sight.” At the age of twelve, Dante was promised marriage to someone else, Gemma Donati, as was common during this era. Years after his marriage, he met Beatrice again and wrote several sonnets for her, but he never mentioned his wife in any of his poems. Dante fathered three children with Gemma.

Dante’s interactions with Beatrice were an example of what was referred to as “courtly love,” or the romantic relationship between two unmarried people during medieval times. In many of Dante’s poems, Beatrice is depicted as semi-divine, always watching over him, and providing spiritual instruction.

As a teenager, Dante dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools, such as the Dominican School in Santa Maria Novella. At around the age of eighteen, Dante met four other Italian poets— Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, and Brunetto Latini— and they influenced one another’s poetic styles.

In 1289, Dante fought in the Battle of Campaldino, a war between factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in the Italian city-states of what is today Central and Northern Italy.

In 1295, Dante became a pharmacist and a politician. Although he never intended to practice as a pharmacist, he did this to develop a political career, as a law required nobles aspiring to public office to be enrolled in an occupation that allowed him admission into this elite guild. As a politician, he held various offices over some years in a city filled with much political unrest.

In 1302, Dante was accused of corruption and financial wrongdoing and was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a large fine. Dante refused to pay the fine, as he did not believe that he was guilty and his assets in Florence were seized, so he was condemned to permanent exile. If he returned to Florence, he could have been burned at the stake. In 2008, almost seven centuries after his death, the city council of Florence passed a motion rescinding Dante’s sentence.

In 1306, Dante became the guest of the captain-general Moroello Malaspina in a historical region of Italy that was known as Lunigiana. After a year, he moved to another historical region of Italy known as Sarzana. Some scholars think that he later moved to another region known as Luca, and there are speculative claims that he visited Paris between 1308 and 1310.

During Dante’s exile, his interest in philosophy and literature deepened, as he was no longer busy with the day-to-day business of Florentine politics, and at some point, he conceived of The Divine Comedy. Although the date that he began his epic poem is uncertain, he worked on it throughout his life, and completed it around 1321, shortly before his death.

The Divine Comedy is a narrative poem, that depicts an imaginative vision of the afterlife. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, which vividly describe Dante’s personally guided tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven by three wise guides— Virgil, Beatrice, and Saint Bernard— who represent human reason, divine revelation, and contemplative mysticism respectively. The poem represents the state of the soul after death, its journey toward God, and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward.

The poem is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature, and one of the greatest works in Western literature, although it was not always as well-regarded as it is today. Although recognized as a masterpiece in the centuries immediately following its publication, the work was largely ignored during the 1700s and early 1800s.

The Divine Comedy was rediscovered in the English-speaking world by artist and poet William Blake— who illustrated several passages of the epic poem in 1826— and the Romantic writers of the 19th century. Later authors such as T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, C. S. Lewis, and James Joyce drew on it for inspiration. There have since been numerous references to Dante’s work in literature, music, and sculpture, and many visual artists have illustrated scenes from The Divine Comedy.

Dante’s final days were spent in Ravenna, in what is today Northern Italy, where he was invited to stay in the city by its prince in 1318. Dante died in 1321 at around the age of 56, after contracting malaria while returning from a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Venice. He was buried in Ravenna, at the Church of San Pier Maggiore, which is known today as the Basilica di San Francesco. In 1483, the Praetor of Venice erected a tomb for him.

Today Dante is described as the “father” of the Italian language, and in Italy, he is often referred to as il Sommo Poeta (the Supreme Poet). In recent years, there have been many references to The Divine Comedy in pop culture, such as in film, television, comics, and video games. Dante also had a huge influence on my own work; my first book, Brainchild, which Carolyn did the cover art for, was inspired by The Divine Comedy.

Some of the quotes that Dante Alighieri is known for include:

Nature is the art of God.

The path to paradise begins in hell.

Love, that moves the sun and the other stars.

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

From a little spark may burst a mighty flame.

Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.

The secret of getting things done is to act!

Follow your own star!

by David Jay Brown

Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, who helped to establish the fields of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. He is most well-known for his theory of the hierocracy of needs, and for developing the concepts of “peak experience” and “self-actualization.”

Abraham Harold Maslow was born in 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, who fled persecution in the early 1900s. Maslow’s parents were poor, and he was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood, without much intellectual stimulation, although his parents valued education.

As a child, Maslow encountered numerous antisemitic gangs in his neighborhood who would tease him. They sometimes chased him and threw rocks at him. Maslow struggled to overcome these painful acts of racism and ethnic prejudice, but they made a deep impression on him.

There was also tension in Maslow’s early childhood home, as both his parents were described as “cold” and “insensitive.” He had trouble getting along with his mother, his father was a heavy drinker, and he grew up with few friends. Maslow spent much of his time alone in libraries, where he developed a love of reading books and learning. Maslow attended Boys High School, one of the top schools in Brooklyn, where he excelled. He was an officer in numerous academic clubs and he became the editor of the school’s Latin magazine.

In 1926, after finishing high school, Maslow attended the City College of New York. He began taking legal studies classes at night, in addition to his undergraduate courses but then stopped doing this. He then spent a year at Cornell University, before returning to and graduating from City College. Maslow then attended the University of Wisconsin’s graduate school, where he studied psychology. In 1928, Maslow married his first cousin, Bertha Goodman, and they had two sons together.

When Maslow entered the academic world of psychology, many psychologists were focusing their careers on finding ways to treat psychopathology or diseases of the mind. However, Maslow, and a small group of other psychologists, became interested in how healthy people excelled in creativity and other positive mental attributes. Maslow stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms.”

From 1937 to 1951, Maslow served on the faculty of Brooklyn College. During this time, he began to question how psychologists had come to their conclusions, and he had his ideas on how to understand the human mind, which he developed as part of the new discipline of humanistic psychology, which he helped to establish.

Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that arose in response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, when Maslow declared that there was a “third force” or “humanistic approach” in psychology. Some of the key elements of humanistic psychology are to “understand people as a whole greater than the sum of their parts,” to “acknowledge the relevance and significance of the full life history of an individual,” to “acknowledge the importance of intentionality in human existence,” and to “recognize the importance of an end goal of life for a healthy person.” Humanistic psychology also acknowledges spiritual aspiration as an integral part of the psyche.

The horrors of World War II inspired a vision of peace in Maslow, that led to his psychological studies of “self-actualization,” and this became the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential. Maslow defined “self-actualization” as “achieving the fullest use of one’s talents and interests,” the need “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

In 1943, in a classic paper titled, A Theory of Human Motivation, published in the journal “Psychological Review,” Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a revolutionary theory of psychological health that is based on the idea that innate human needs have to be fulfilled in a certain sequential priority, that culminates in self-actualization through “peak experiences,” or “high points in life when people feel in harmony with themselves and their surroundings.”

Maslow placed these different needs on a pyramid, with seven ascending levels, ranging from “basic biological needs,” to “feelings of safety,” to “Love and belonging,” and “self-esteem,” up through to higher levels of “intellectual stimulation,” “aesthetic appreciation,” and eventually, at the top of the pyramid, “self-actualization.”

From 1951 to 1969, Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1962, Maslow published a collection of papers that focused on the positive qualities in people, which he developed into his classic 1968 book Toward a Psychology of Being. In 1963, Maslow was nominated to be the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, but he rejected the nomination because he felt that the organization should develop an intellectual movement without a leader.

During the latter part of the 1960s, along with Stanislav Grof, Michael Murphy, Viktor Frankl, and others, Maslow founded the school of transpersonal psychology, an area of psychology that seeks to go beyond humanistic psychology and integrate the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience within the framework of modern psychology.

Maslow identified various mystical, ecstatic, or spiritual states as higher peak experiences that went beyond self-actualization into what he called “transcendence.” Maslow called these experiences “a fourth force in psychology,” which were named as aspects of transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology was concerned with the “empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of… mystical, ecstatic, and spiritual states.”

In 1969, Maslow, Grof, and others were among the initiators behind the publication of the premier issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and Maslow became one of the first teachers at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Maslow also taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, in New York City.

Maslow died in 1970 at the age of 62, from a heart attack while jogging, in Menlo Park, California. He is buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th Century, and his work continues to exert an influence today.

Some of the quotes that Abraham Maslow is known for include:

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.

Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?

Self-actualized people…live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

by David Jay Brown