Editing Lord Alfred Douglas (section)

==Later life==
Douglas's feelings towards Wilde began to soften after Douglas's own incarceration in 1924. He wrote in ''Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up'', "Sometimes a sin is also a crime (for example, a murder or theft), but this is not the case with homosexuality, any more than with adultery."<ref>(Murray pp 309–310)</ref> In 1933 he gave a talk about poetry to the Catholic Poetry Society on 'The Catholic attitude to certain poets.' Of Wilde, Douglas said: 'Many years [after Wilde's death] and after I had become a Catholic, I reacted violently against him...Converts are very apt to be censorious and to be more Catholic than Catholics...I hope I am now more charitable and broad-minded than I was...After swinging to two extremes in my estimate of Wilde I have now got into what I believe to be the happy mean.'<ref>{{cite book |last1=Murray |first1=Douglas |title=Bosie: The Tragic Life of Lord Alfred Douglas |date=2020 |publisher=Sceptre |page=266 |edition=2nd}}</ref> Similarly, in 1935 he wrote to the theatre manager Norman Marshall regarding Marshall's proposed production of a play about the Wilde scandal, closing his letter, 'Devoted as I still am and always will be to the memory of this brilliant and wonderful man and conscious as I am and always shall be about my own failings...Wilde was the author of what I consider to be, apart from Shakespeare, the finest comedy in the English language.'<ref>{{cite book |title=Ibid |page=281}}</ref>

Throughout the 1930s and up to his death, Douglas kept up correspondence with many people, including [[Marie Stopes]] and [[George Bernard Shaw]]. [[Anthony Wynn]] based his play ''Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship'' on the letters between Shaw and Douglas. One of Douglas's final public appearances was a well-received lecture to the [[Royal Society of Literature]] on 2 September 1943 on ''The Principles of Poetry'', published in an edition of 1,000 copies. He attacked the poetry of [[T. S. Eliot]]; the talk was praised by [[Arthur Quiller-Couch]] and [[Augustus John]].<ref>Murray pp. 318–319.</ref>

[[Harold Nicolson]] described his impression of Douglas after meeting him at a lunch party in 1936: {{blockquote|There is a little trace of his good looks left. His nose has assumed a curious beaklike shape, his mouth has twisted into shapes of nervous irritability, and his eyes, although still blue, are yellow and bloodshot. He makes nervous and twitching movements with freckled and claw-like hands. He stoops slightly and drags a leg. Yet behind this appearance of a little, cross, old gentleman flits the shape of a young man of the 'nineties, with little pathetic sunshine-flashes of the 1893 boyishness and gaiety. I had fully expected the self-pity, suspicion and implied irritability, but I had not foreseen that there would be any remnant of merriment and boyishness. Obviously the great tragedy of his life has scarred him deeply. He talked very frankly about his marriage and about his son, who is in a home at [[Northampton]].<ref>{{Cite book |title=Harold Nicolson Diaries & Letters 1930–39 |author=Harold Nicolson |publisher=Collins |year=1966 |page=261}}</ref>}}

In the book, ''Secret Historian'', Samuel Steward (a professor, poet, and novelist) wrote in his diary that he met Lord Alfred Douglas when Douglas was 67; Steward was 27. Lord Alfred professed that he was beyond "sins of the flesh," yet ends up in bed with Steward. Douglas proclaims that Wilde and he did little more than kiss and find other men for each other.<ref>{{Cite book|author=Justin Spring |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|year=2010}}</ref>

Douglas's only child, Raymond, was diagnosed in 1927, at the age of 24, with [[schizoaffective disorder]] and entered [[St Andrew's Hospital]], a mental institution. Though decertified and discharged after five years, he suffered another breakdown and returned to the hospital. In February 1944, when his mother died of a [[cerebral haemorrhage]] at the age of 70, Raymond was able to attend her funeral, and in June he was again decertified. His conduct rapidly deteriorated, and he again returned to St Andrew's in November, where he stayed until his death on 10 October 1964.<ref>[http://www.anthonywynn.com/bosietimeline/ "Timeline to the Life of Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas" anthonywynn.com] Retrieved 24 August 2011.</ref>