Ernest Dowson Lyric Lives

Ernest Dowson: Lyric Lives is the first full-length critical study of this canonical writer to appear in English. It challenges the many myths that have surrounded Dowson's life and work for more than a century, contending that, in his distinct theory of muse-fired inspiration; his authentic Catholic confessionalism; his deep love of France, its literary tradition, and its culture; his prolonged battle with tuberculosis; and his final abandonment of creative writing, Dowson is among the most engaged and representative artists of this fascinating era. Far from the moribund dream-lover of legend, Dowson, in fact, led an engrossing and robust existence, while practicing a vigorous, sullen craft; he wrote about the subjects which poets have always written about, with inimitable style and incorrigible élan.

Ernest Dowson presents a chronological and comprehensive series of generative new readings of his work, situated in relation to that of his notable contemporaries, as well as the pressing cultural and aesthetic debates of the Victorian fin de siècle. It explores the drastic implications of Dowson's and his era's myopically aesthetical attitude towards life, and reveals precisely how he transformed his own lived experience into art. By reinstating an author of flesh-and-blood at the heart of his slender canon, and by ousting the legendary imposter of our collective, critical imagination, this volume aims to resuscitate Dowson's small but illustrious oeuvre, reclaiming it from likely oblivion.

Robert Stark, Independent Scholar

Since completing a PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2007, Robert Stark has lectured on modern poetry, literature, and critical theory throughout the world. His professional absorption in the field of poetry and poetics now extends to four or five reasonably distinct ways of knowing: including original composition, interpretation, historical exegesis, the editorial establishment of poetic texts, and the classroom promulgation of literature. His scholarship focuses on the margins of modernism, and on the ways in which writers, and poets especially, use other writing (especially verse) to make sense.