Despite his open homosexuality he strongly felt himself to have a vocation for the priesthood throughout his lifetime.[105] His most famous work was the decadent semi-autobiographical wish-fulfilment novel Hadrian the Seventh, published under his self-styled title Baron Corvo, in which he imagined himself as the Pope, but he also wrote short stories, poetry and essays.[106] Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was inspired to become poet by the metaphysical teachings of Oscott's professor of philosophy during the 1850s,[107] but embarked upon a succession of affairs during his subsequent career as a diplomat, becoming a self-confessed hedonist.[108] He is best known for his erotic verse, and for his anti-imperialist opposition to British policy in Ireland, Egypt, Sudan and India.[109] In 1914 a group of poets including W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington entertained Blunt to a lunch of roast peacock, paying tribute to him as the first poet to relate poetry to real life.[108] Pound wrote of Blunt's "unconquered flame",[108] though Yeats was more ambivalent, confiding in T. Sturge Moore that "only a small part of his work is good but that is exceedingly fine".[110]