This line is commonly misattributed to Oscar Wilde. This is pretty much explained by the fact that it was used against Wilde in his trial for gross indecency, which resulted from the failure of his attempt to prosecute the Marquess of Queensberry – the father of the actual author, Lord Alfred Douglas – for libel.
Douglas wrote the poem in 1892, and it was published in the Oxford magazine The Chameleon in December 1894. It was in February 1895 that the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at Wilde's club, the Albermarle. The inscription "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite (sic) was regarded by Wilde as libellous; his private prosecution came to court in April 1895, but was soon dropped on the advice of his lawyers, after the defence counsel announced in his opening speech that he'd located several male prostitutes who were to testify that they'd had sex with Wilde. Because Queensberry was thus acquitted, Wilde was obliged to pay his legal costs, and this bankrupted him.
Wilde was arrested three days later, on charges of gross indecency (homosexual acts not amounting to buggery). His trial opened in April 1895. The prosecuting counsel asked Wilde, under cross–examination, to explain what "the love that dare not speak its name" was; his eloquent response was seen as counter–productive, in a legal sense, as it only served to reinforce the charges of homosexual behaviour. Wilde was found guilty, and sentenced to two years' hard labour (which the judge described as "totally inadequate for a case such as this").
Following his release in 1897, Wilde fled to France. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol in a seaside village in Normandy, and in August 1897 he was briefly reunited with Douglas. They lived together in Naples for a few months, but were separated by their families' threats to cut off funds.
Wilde's last address was a dingy hotel in the Paris neighbourhood of Saint–German–des–Prés. Before long he was sufficiently confined to his hotel to joke, on one of his final trips outside, "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go". This led to another common misapprehension: that these (or something similar) were his final words.
By November 1900 Wilde had developed meningitis – probably related to a fall that he'd suffered while in prison, in which his right ear drum was ruptured. He died on 30 November 1900. Originally buried in a cemetery outside Paris, his remains were moved in 1909 to Père Lachaise Cemetery – Paris's largest and most famous, and the world's most–visited necropolis. The famous tomb, designed by Jacob Epstein, was commissioned by Robert Ross – a Canadian–British journalist, art critic and art dealer, who'd been one of Wilde's first male lovers.
© Haydn Thompson 2021