Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian:
The work Wilde is remembered for was written over a period of less than 10 years. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was published in 1888. That volume marks the beginning of Wilde's true creativity. He had lectured extensively in the US – but that would not have won him any lasting legacy, any more than his journalism or his poems. He had published a great many poems, but Wilde was a bad poet – he rarely found the right words and he was old-fashioned. Read him next to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman or WB Yeats, and you will see for yourself. We don't read his poetry now – it is dated and dead; too much Arcady and Hellenic Hours. The early plays suffer from the same verbal excess. Wilde at his worst wrote in purple. At his best he is dazzling. The birth of his children seems to have regenerated Wilde as a writer. The tedious Hellenism vanished. The purple-isms faded. There are still overwritten images – Dawn's grey fingers clutching at the stars – and he never gives up his fondness for a biblical moment, usually appearing as precious stones or pronouns (thee and thy), but his style did change. The writing became freer and sharper, and also more self-reflective, without being self-absorbed.
Academic criticism of Wilde's work has too often dismissed these fairy stories as a minor bit of sentimentalism scribbled off by an iconoclast during a temporary bout of babymania. But since JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, children's literature has been repositioned as central, not peripheral, shifting what children read, what we write about what children read, and what we read as adults. At last we seem to understand that imagination is ageless. Wilde's children's stories are splendid. In addition, it seems to me that they should be revisited as a defining part of his creative process.
More here.
