A Guest Post From Jack Seney

Mr Seney reviews the life and poetry of Ernest Dowson, a convert to Catholicism, who died at the age of 32 of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism.

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Ernest Dowson, British poet circa the late 1800s, has put some words out there that are remembered long after him. "Gone with the wind," for example, appears in one of his poems, but is much better known as the name of a potboiler southern-U.S. novel made into a big-time melodramatic movie. This does little justice to Dowson, who died broke, unknown and young but produced some significant writing nonetheless.

Born to the respectable and somewhat monied upper middle class, Dowson was treated to a good and proper education. But right from the start he had little desire for anything but poetry and literature and the writing of these himself.

Once he was minimally old enough Dowson threw himself into the company of other writers, and those writers were frequently drinkers and experimental drug takers on the fringes of life in London, loosely known as "the Decadents," who dated back to Baudelaire and had active ideas of living in debauchery in order to create art of a new vibrancy.

With a family history of tuberculosis that was rapidly taking all of his relatives (his mother hung herself rather than face it) Dowson compounded matters by becoming a daily drunkard and sapping his health in that way as well. But throughout his twenties he did manage to write some slim poetry volumes, to collaborate with others on novels, and to write a well-received mini-play.

Dowson was hopelessly in love with the vivacious daughter of a Polish restaurant owner, and his inability to win her became the focal point of his depressive view of life. He started pursuing her for marriage when she was 14, which was not so unusual at the time (her parents were not upset by it and she herself was greatly flattered), but which would get him branded as an "attempted rapist" by half-crazed feminists now.

His Polish beloved had other ideas about whom to marry, and Dowson journeyed to France in an attempt to escape his suffering and heartache. There he found work as a translator, and an even worse bunch of Decadents with whom to carouse and ruin his health.

Along the way, Dowson converted to Catholicism. Some thought this a further scheme to win his Polish girl, but he took it seriously in his own strange manner. Some other British Decadents were also attracted to Catholicism, probably seeing it as a poke in the eye against Victorian-Anglican England.

Dowson returned to England broke, with insufficient translator work available and with little income promised from his "family estate." He lived in poverty in order to drink daily. But he kept writing, so that by the time he was staying at friends' houses as a homeless pauper his one main possession was his notebook. He died at age 32 of tuberculosis exacerbated by alcoholism in 1900, with a friend's wife nursing him. He was buried in a Catholic cemetery.

Dowson's poems are often short, but exquisitely lyrical and formal in structure. Their viewpoint is what is most striking about them, with him deciding that life is merely brief and fleeting, but leaving the beginnings and endings of life sufficiently mysterious to allow for better worlds. In many ways his poems are a perfect example of Decadence as an artistic movement, with both its extremities and its hazily communicated hopes.