Ernest Dowson
born Aug. 2, 1867, Lee, Kent, Eng.
died Feb. 23, 1900, Lewisham, London
one of the most gifted of the circle of
English poets of the 1890s known as the
Decadents.
In 1886 Dowson entered Queen’s College,
Oxford, but left in 1888 to spend six years
working at his father’s dry dock in the
Limehouse district of London. Dowson became
an active member of the Rhymers’ Club, a
group of writers that included William
Butler Yeats and Arthur Symons. In 1891 he
met the woman who would inspire some of his
best poetry, Adelaide Foltinowicz, whose
parents kept a modest restaurant in Soho,
London. In that same year he published his
best-known poem, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae
sub Regno Cynarae,” popularly known from its
refrain as “I have been faithful to thee,
Cynara, in my fashion.” Adelaide, who was 12
years old when they met, declined his offer
of marriage, but he pursued her for the next
six years, drowning the pain of his
unrequited love with wine and women and
demanding as time went on “madder music and
stronger wine.”
He was received into the Roman Catholic
Church about 1892. In 1894 his father died,
his mother committed suicide, the family
business failed, and Dowson discovered the
symptoms of his tuberculosis. In 1897
Adelaide married one of her father’s
waiters; after that, Dowson lived mostly in
France, supporting himself by contributions
to The Savoy and translations of Émile Zola,
Honoré de Balzac, Voltaire, and other French
authors. He was discovered in Paris
wretched, penniless, and ill by a friend,
R.H. Sherard, who took him back to London,
where he died in Sherard’s house.
Dowson published two novels in
collaboration with Arthur Moore, A Comedy of
Masks (1893) and Adrian Rome (1899), and a
book of short stories, Dilemmas (1895), but
his reputation rests on his poetry: Verses
(1896), the verse play The Pierrot of the
Minute (1897), and Decorations in Verse and
Prose (1899). His lyrics, much influenced by
French poet Paul Verlaine and marked by
meticulous attention to melody and cadence,
turn the conventional world-weariness of the
1890s into a deeper sense of the sadness of
things. Yeats acknowledged that much of his
own technical development was due to Dowson.
