Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde conquered London with epigrams and comedies, then lost everything in the 1895 trials that sent him to prison for two years' hard labour. Out of that ruin came his greatest poem: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), published not under his name but under his cell number, C.3.3.

The ballad, occasioned by the hanging of a fellow prisoner, gave English one of its darkest refrains: "each man kills the thing he loves." His short elegy "Requiescat," written for his sister Isola, who died at nine, shows the tenderness underneath all that wit: "Tread lightly, she is near."

He died in a Paris hotel at 46, bankrupt and exiled, three years after his release.