De profundis is a letter that Wilde wrote to his former friend Bosie while serving his sentence at Reading jail.
It's a long, beautiful and very sorrowful text where the author tries to explain the sequence of events that lead to his imprisonment, what his friend's responsibilities were and what mistakes he himself made (mostly out of weakness and kindness, in his opinion).
The tone is often heart rendering. Wilde is perfectly aware of what his standing as a wealthy aristocrat, internationally renown person, original artist and competent art critic was just a few months earlier. He knows fully well that the imprisonment has had a disastrous impact on his reputation and after about a year of lonesome desperation he has made up his mind to accept what happened, to open up to the person who manipulated him, interfered with his activities, ruined and abandoned him, and to plan a successful return to the art world as soon as he's completely served his sentence.
The book includes a couple of treaties on the importance of individualism (the aforementioned letter also deals profusely with the subject), a few poems and the famous Ballad of Reading Gaol, already reviewed here.
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