Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson

Ernest Christopher Dowson (2 August 1867 – 23 February 1900) was an English poet, novelist and writer of short stories. He is associated with the Decadent movement.

Biography

Ernest Dowson was born in Lee, London, in 1867. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, a poet (Browning's "Waring") and politician who had been Premier of New Zealand. When he was two, his sister (or cousin) Sybil, then aged four, tried to drown him, but his screams were heard in time. Dowson attended The Queen's College, Oxford, but left (in March 1888) before obtaining a degree. In November 1888, he started work with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, east London, which was established by the poet's grandfather. He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls, and taking the performers to dinner.^{[citation needed]} Meanwhile, he was also working assiduously at his writing. He was a member of the Rhymers' Club, which included W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson. He was also a frequent contributor to the literary magazines The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Dowson collaborated on two unsuccessful novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole, and wrote reviews for The Critic.^{[citation needed]}

Dowson was also a prolific translator of French fiction, including novels by Balzac and the Goncourt brothers, and Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.^{[citation needed]}

In 1889, at the age of 23, Dowson fell in love with the eleven-year-old Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurant owner.^{[citation needed]} Adelaide is reputed to be the subject of one his best-known poems, Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.^{[citation needed]} He pursued her unsuccessfully, and in 1897 Dowson was crushed when she married a tailor who lodged above her father's restaurant.^{[citation needed]} In August 1894 Dowson's father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895, and soon Dowson began to decline rapidly.^{[citation needed]}

Robert Sherard found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford where he was himself living.^{[citation needed]} Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard's cottage and died there of alcoholism at the age of 32.^{[citation needed]} He is buried in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries.

Works

Dowson is best remembered for vivid phrases, such as "days of wine and roses":

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

– Ernest Dowson, from "Vitae Summa Brevis" (1896).

and "gone with the wind":

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

– Ernest Dowson, from Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae, third stanza (1894).

This latter poem was first published in The Second Book of the Rhymer's Club in 1894, and was noticed by Richard le Gallienne in his Wanderings in Bookland column in The Idler, volume 9. The last line of this stanza, which is the last line of all four stanzas of the poem, was the inspiration for the song title "Always True to You in My Fashion" from Kiss Me, Kate by Cole Porter.^{[citation needed]} Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of the third stanza's first line, chose that line as the title of her novel Gone with the Wind.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Dowson also provides the earliest use of the word soccer in written language (although he spells it socca, presumably because it did not yet have a standard written form).

His prose works include the short stories collected as Dilemmas (1895), and the two novels A Comedy of Masks (1893) and Adrian Rome (each co-written with Arthur Moore). Some of his short prose was first published in the journal The Yellow Book.

Legacy

Frederick Delius set a number of Dowson's poems, in his Songs of Sunset and Cynara.

In anticipation of the anniversary of Dowson's birth on 2 August 2010, his grave, which had fallen derelict and been vandalized, was restored. The unveiling and memorial service were publicised in the local (South London Press) and national (BBC Radio 4 and the Times Literary Supplement) British press, and dozens paid posthumous tribute to the poet 110 years after his death.

In a 1900 memoir in the "Poems and Prose of Ernest Downson", Arthur Symons described Dowson as "... a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius ... There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally ... He had the pure lyric gift, unweighed or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion; ...".

Eugene O'Neill quotes Dowson's poems in his autobiographical plays Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

References

Citations

Sources

• Dowson, Ernest (2007) [1900]. The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson. Middlesex, England: The Echo Library. ISBN 978-1406-825961. 
• Adams, Jad (2000). Madder Music, Stronger Wine. The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent. London, England: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 1-86064-714-6. 
• Mathews, Elkin; Lane, John (1894). The Second Book of the Rhymers' Club. Edinburgh, UK: J. Miller & Son. 
• The Idler 9. Princeton University: Chatto & Windus. 1896. 
• Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia, with a bibliography compiled by H. Guy Harrison (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1914).
• See also sections in: Madonnas and Magdalens - the origins and developments of Victorian sexual attitudes. London. Eric Trudgill. (Heinemann, 1976).

Further reading

Primary Works (modern scholarly editions)

• Ernest Dowson, The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947)
• Ernest Dowson, The Poems of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962)
• Ernest Dowson, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London: Cassell, 1967)
• Ernest Dowson, The Poetry of Ernest Dowson, ed. by Desmond Flower (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970)
• Ernest Dowson, The Pierrot of the Minute, restored edition with Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations (CreateSpace, 2012)
• Ernest Dowson, Le Pierrot de la Minute, bilingual illustrated edition with French translation by Philippe Baudry (CreateSpace, 2012)

Biographies

• Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2000)
• Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson: A Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945)
• Henry Maas, Ernest Dowson: Poetry and Love in the 1890s (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2009)

Critical Studies on Dowson and the 1890s

• Elisa Bizzotto, La mano e l'anima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siècle (Milano: Cisalpino, 2001)
• Jean-Jacques Chardin, Ernest Dowson et la crise fin de siècle anglaise (Paris: Editions Messene, 1995)
• Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)
• B. Ifor Evans, English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1966)
• Ian Fletcher, Decadence and the 1890s (London: Edward Arnold, 1979)
• Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Duckworth, 1949)
• Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927)
• Agostino Lombardo, La poesia inglese dall'estetismo al simbolismo (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950)
• Franco Marucci, Storia della letteratura inglese dal 1870 al 1921 (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2006)
• William Monahan (11 October 2000). "A Gallows Sermon: Life & Death Among the Decadents". New York Press. Retrieved 6 March 2007. 
• Murray G. H. Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993)
• Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1976)
• Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period (London: Longman, 1988)
• Thomas Burnett Swann, Ernest Dowson (New York: Twayne, 1964)
• Arthur Symons, The Memoirs of Arthur Symons, ed. by Karl Beckson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977)
• William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955)

External links

• Poems (1900)
• A few of Dowson's poems, through the University of Toronto.
• Arthur Symons' memoir of Dowson.
• Works by Ernest Dowson at Project Gutenberg
• Dowson, Schoenberg and the birth of Modernism, Horizon Review
• Ernest Dowson at Find a Grave
• Text of Days of Wine and Roses