✅ Answers
Answerer 1
It is not seen directly in Wilde’s poems and can be inferred there and in his dramatic works only by implication. That is to say, he does not present homosexuality explicitly in his verse. Only in _The Picture of Dorian Grey_ does the idea come through as such (more in some versions or texts of this work than in others.)
The poems can be read as homosexual, but it takes interpreting them in the light of Wilde’s biography to do so. In “Endymion,” for example, the shepherd is presented in sensual and eroticised imagery, and since it is Wilde who is writing the poem, by implication the author understands the attraction of a beautiful shepherd boy. The poem presents the love for Endymion in a heterosexual situation—Endymion’s lover is female—but the poem retains a heavily homoerotic tone because it presents Endymion as so desirable. It is not hard to imagine that a male-male eros that prompted these lines:
Where is my own true lover gone,
Where are the lips vermilion,
The shepherd’s crook, the purple shoon?
Why spread that silver pavilion,
Why wear that veil of drifting mist?
Ah! thou hast young Endymion,
Thou hast the lips that should be kissed!
In “Silentium Amoris,” to cite another example, the subject is silent love. While this love is never mentioned as homosexual, the motive for the silence may well be that this is a “love that dare not speak its name,” to quote the line from Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas:
So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.
But does it have to be homosexual? Not necessarily.
The heterosexual love that seems often enough to be the subject of Wilde’s verse has a literary, often sentimental cast, with archaic “hath”‘s and artificial images. That jibes with the displacement of the purported loved object onto the feminine, but this is a disingenuous argument, for a reader who did not know that Wilde was the author—suppose it had been Ernest Dowson?—might well attribute it to bottled-up or frustrated heterosexual passion.