Ernest Dowson

Abstract By meticulous analysis of his holograph notebook, dating each composition, and reading his oeuvre chronologically for the first time, Ernest Dowson: Lyric Lives finally dispels the myths which have masqueraded as literary criticism of Dowson’s life and work for more than a century. The cornerstone of the so-called ‘Dowson Legend’, the authorial and critical promotion of Adelaide Foltinowicz as the incontrovertible muse of his writing, is, simply, a canard: Dowson did not write extensively about her, in verse. Liberated from the stubborn observer effect of this mythopoeic interference—the more authority is invested in the legend, the less fathomable become all datapoints which do not adequate to myth, no matter how intrinsically knowable they are—Dowson’s extraordinary writing is free to assume the importance and prominence it deserves. His relationship with Aesthetic and Decadent tradition; his Catholicism; his love of France, its literature and culture; his long battle with tuberculosis; and final abandonment of creative writing, all come fully into focus in the first comprehensive, chronological study of a dynamic writer at the epicentre of the aesthetic and cultural debates of the fin de siècle, who wrote about the subjects that poets have always written about, under the sway of the same miscellaneous passions. The pun, in short, is intended: Ernest Dowson: Lyric Lives reinstalls an author of flesh-and-blood at the heart of this astonishing, but disregarded, oeuvre and, doing so, reclaims the author and his works from probable oblivion.