De Profundis is an epistolic account of Oscar Wilde’s spiritual journey while in prison, and describes his new, shocking conviction that “the supreme vice is shallowness”. Also included is The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde’s most famous poem and one of the greatest ballads in the English language. Wilde wrote the poem in mid-1897 while staying with Robert Ross in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.