Through his lectures, as well as his early poetry, Wilde established himself as a leading proponent of the aesthetic movement, a theory of art and literature that emphasized the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, rather than to promote any political or social viewpoint. Upon the conclusion of his American tour, Wilde returned home and immediately commenced another lecture circuit of England and Ireland that lasted until the middle of 1884. 'There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much,'' he later wrote to his idol. While not lecturing, he managed to meet with some of the leading American scholars and literary figures of the day, including Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. The next year, in 1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on an American lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140 lectures in just nine months. While the book received only modest critical praise, it nevertheless established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer. There, he continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems, in 1881. Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among London's high society. In 1878, the year of his graduation, his poem 'Ravenna' won the Newdigate Prize for the best English verse composition by an Oxford undergraduate. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained attempts at creative writing.

At Oxford, Wilde continued to excel academically, receiving first class marks from his examiners in both classics and classical moderations. Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as Trinity's best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship for further study at Magdalen College in Oxford. At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872, he placed first in the school's classics examination and received the college's Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates. Upon graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin. He won the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his last two years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. He attended the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek and Roman studies. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet who was closely associated with the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, a skilled linguist whose acclaimed English translation of Pomeranian novelist Wilhelm Meinhold's Sidonia the Sorceress had a deep influence on her son's later writing. Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, entirely at his own personal expense, to treat the city's poor. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was knighted for his work as a medical advisor for the Irish censuses. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of 'gross indecency' in 1895. As a dramatist, many of Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism.

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England.

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