author
Ernest Christopher Dowson
1867–1900
A key voice of the English Decadent movement, he wrote musical, melancholy poems that left a lasting mark despite his short life. His work gave English some famously haunting phrases, including “days of wine and roses.”
2 Audiobooks
The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, With a Memoir by Arthur Symons
by Ernest Christopher Dowson
A Comedy of Masks: A Novel
by Ernest Christopher Dowson, Arthur Moore
About the author
Born in 1867, Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer associated with the fin-de-siècle Decadent movement. He studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, but left without taking a degree, later working in his family’s business and moving in literary circles that included the Rhymers’ Club.
Dowson is remembered above all for the mood and music of his poetry: wistful, carefully shaped, and often centered on longing, loss, and disillusion. His best-known books include Verses (1896), The Pierrot of the Minute (1897), and Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899), alongside fiction and collaborative novels.
His life was brief and troubled, and he died in 1900 at just 32. Even so, his reputation endured, with later readers returning to the sad elegance of his poems and to lines that entered the language far beyond literary circles.