The Picture of Dorian Gray biography, "Oscar Wilde" (1989), the literary critic Richard Ellmann said that: Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost [was], Huysmans's "À rebours" ... to a correspondent, he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon "À rebours", and someday must write it down. The references in "Dorian Gray" to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate. Some commentators have suggested that "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was influenced by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's (anonymously published) first novel "Vivian Grey" (1826) as, "a kind of homage from one outsider to
The Last Picture in the World The Last Picture in the World The Last Picture in the World is a poem written by Canadian poet Al Purdy in 1999. It appears in the book "Beyond Remembering: the collected poems of Al Purdy" along with other poems that he wrote over his lifetime. <poem> A hunched grey shape framed by leaves with lake water behind standing on our little point of land like a small monk in a green monastery meditating except that it's alive brooding immobile permanent for half an hour a blue heron and it occurs to me that if I were to die at