The Sphinx (poem)

Though at first coldly received by critics it is now generally recognized as Wilde's finest Decadent poem,[1] and has been described as "unrivalled: a quintessential piece of fin-de-siècle art".

He contrasts her immense antiquity with his own "twenty summers",[5] and begins to enumerate scenes of Classical history and Egyptian mythology, asking her if she witnessed them.

[9] The writing of The Sphinx was a long and complicated process, lasting almost twenty years and producing eleven surviving groups of manuscripts.

[20][21][22] The prime influence on The Sphinx was the French Decadent movement, particularly Huysmans' À rebours, the cat sonnets in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, and the poems of Maurice Rollinat.

[34] suggest Luc-Olivier Merson's painting "Repose on the Flight into Egypt", with its depiction of the Virgin and Child resting between the Sphinx's paws.

[41] The disappointing reception of The Sphinx provoked George Bernard Shaw to write to one reviewer, "The critic's first duty is to admit, with absolute respect, the right of every man to his own style.

"[43] In the same year The Globe declared it "among the most remarkable works ever penned by human hand...If such lines have not the haunting, magical touch of the true poet, we know not where to look for it in all English literature.

"[44] In 1946 Wilde's biographer Hesketh Pearson took a similar view: "No doubt The Sphinx could pass as poetry in an age that had forgotten how to write it and mistook word-patterns for the real thing...This kind of thing has about it the interest of the cross-word puzzle, for those who find cross-word puzzles interesting, and the reader is kept wondering what quaint word the author will come across when next he dips into the dictionary.

"[45] This criticism of the poem is still made, with Tully Atkinson in 2003 noting that much of The Sphinx is "nonsense poetry of the purest verbal music of rhythm and rhyme...just humorous wordplay of phantasmagoria",[46] while Isobel Murray has remarked that some phrases "defy explanation, because they evolved accidentally in composition".

Some critics, such as Ruth Robbins and Wilde's editor Anne Varty, have suspected him of a "confusion of religious sentiment with secular sensuality" in his invocation of Christ on the Cross.

[51][52] Another common criticism was first made by one of the original reviewers of the poem, who asserted that "Mr. Wilde's crucifix is no less an artistic property than his nenuphars and monoliths";[51] likewise Anne Varty thought that the dismissal of the Sphinx comes too late to carry conviction,[52] and the critic Norbert Kohl suggested that Wilde had "taken fright at his own daring and...run back at the last moment to the safety of Victorian moral convention".

[53] Tully Atkinson sees in this a portrayal of the compromised religious faith of the proto-Modern man, which "while imperfect in him, offers a sublimity greater than himself and the world".

[55] In 1925 the Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov set a Russian translation of the poem, under the title Sfinks, as a cantata for tenor, choir and orchestra.

[58] The saxophonist and jazz composer Trish Clowes included a setting of The Sphinx, with vocals by Kathleen Willison, on her 2012 album And in the Night-Time She Is There.