ERNEST CHRISTOPHER DOWSON (1874)

One of the most gifted of a circle of English poets of the 1890s -the socalled Decadents- whose philosophy was art for art´s sake and whose themes were often deliberately calculated to shock the Victorian public.

As a boy he lived an unsettled life, travelling in France and Italy with his parents, both consumptives in search of a favourable climate.

In 1886 he entered Queen´s College, Oxford, but left in 1888 when a decline in his father´s dock in the Limehouse district in London.

Dowson was an active member of the Rhymers Club, a group of "decadents" that included William Butler Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley.

His literary idols were Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Swinburne.

In 1891 he met the woman of his life and the inspiration for most of his poetry, Adelaide Foltinowicz, a waitress in her parents restaurant (named "Poland") in Soho. In that same year he became a Roman Catholic convert and 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 Dowson remained faithful to her, in his fashion, 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".

In 1894 his father died, his mother committed suicide and Dowson discovered the symptoms of his own tuberculosis. In 1897 Adelaide married one of her father´s waiters; after that Dowson lived mostly in France supporting himself by ill-paid translations. He was discovered wretched and penniless, addicted to absinthe and ill, by a friend R.H. Sherard who brought 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) and Decorations (1899).

Though his output is slight, his range limited and his love themes repetitive, his lyrics, marked by meticulous attention to melody and cadence, are polished and often charming. W. B. Yeats acknowledged that much of his own technical development was due to Dowson whose influence can also be traced in the early work of Rupert Brooke.