Ernest Dowson is frequently considered to be the archetypal Decadent poet, the quintessence of 1890s writing, as much because of the details of his life as for the nature of his art. He is taken to represent the self-destructive figure who writes...

In the early 1890s Ernest Dowson created lyrics that rival even the most perfect creations of the seventeenth-century English poets. Already fatally ill in his twenties, he wrote for only a half dozen years and had virtually completed his contribution...

Ernest Dowson's poetry has not been given the emphasis it deserves because critics have linked it to a decadent lifestyle. However, it actually explores the need to move beyond erotic or aesthetic pleasure and attempts to discover something beyond those elements. Dowson distances desire...

Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent. Jad Adams. I.B. Tauris. [pound]19.95. 211 pages. ISBN 1-86064-470-8. Ernest Dowson ... a hundred years dead this millennium ... fifty-five years since last 'biographed'. Now comes along the latest singer...

In the following essay, Cushman describes "The Dying of Francis Donne" as "a masterly delineation of the psychology of dying" in which its protagonist succeeds in escaping "the tyranny of time only by intellectual detachment and by death. "