In the fading light of Victorian England, when the certainties of empire began to crack and a fin-de-siècle weariness settled over the literary world, Ernest Christopher Dowson emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices of his generation. His brief, tragic life—spanning a mere thirty-two years from 1867 to 1900—produced poetry of such delicate melancholy and exquisite craftsmanship that it continues to ca…
“It's an attempt at mere sound verse, with scarcely the shadow of a sense in it: or hardly that so much as a vague Verlainesque emotion. It's an inferior production.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“Hope, in the soul, seems the unconscious witness of this principle of things.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
