Wilde’s two-year sentence to hard labor destroyed his health and career but was the inspiration for his only major poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
In 1895, he was convicted of “sodomy and gross indecency” after quarreling with his lover’s father. Wilde’s two-year sentence to hard labor destroyed his health and career but was the inspiration for his only major poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”