Wilde's poetry is reminiscent of Keats, Rossetti, and Swinburne, and his philosophy was a dandyism taken from Baudelaire and the French critic Barbey d'Aurevilly, and from Carlyle's remarks in Sartor Resartus (1833-34) on the "dandiacal body." To such familiar propositions as "clothes are the man," "form is content," and "beauty is truth," Wilde added his own, such as "manners before morals," that, for the Victorians at least, were full of menace.
