Remarks by Ernest Dowson | V2Melody Quotations

“Passion is waste — takes away from a man's stability, his self-centralization: its action on general culture, aestheticism, philosophy, manysidedness, all that makes life endurable, is ruinous.”

A strikingly severe youthful judgement on passion and its power to disturb intellectual self-possession · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“A man may long for water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it.”

A concise rebuttal of the idea that human longing proves the existence of what is longed for · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“I object most strongly to a personal immortality. Immortality! Wretched ideal. Infinite ennui — I die at the thought.”

A provocative youthful rejection of personal immortality on grounds of endless weariness · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism.”

Showing the young Dowson framing belief chiefly through the opposition between hopeful and pessimistic views of existence · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“Faith, I think does pass, and Love, but Knowledge abideth. Let us seek Knowledge. At least let us shun emotion as we would hell, for which it is a synonym.”

A youthful attempt to place knowledge above faith, love and emotional experience · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“The conclusion of the whole matter — a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.”

An early expression of the pessimism that would remain closely associated with Dowson's outlook · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

“He was in wonderful form, but has changed a good deal — he seems of much broader sympathies, much more human & simple. And his delight in the country, in walking, in the simplicities of life is enchanting.”

Dowson's warm observation of Oscar Wilde shortly after Wilde's release from prison · Letter to Conal O'Riordan, c. 10 June 1897

“The other day I met Oscar & dined with him at his seaside retreat; I had some difficulty in suppressing my own sourness & attuning myself to his enormous joy in life just at this moment.”

A vivid contrast between Dowson's melancholy temperament and Oscar Wilde's renewed delight in life · Letter to Conal O'Riordan, c. 10 June 1897

“I have always had, alas, too much of that swift, disastrous & suicidal energy which destroyed our dear & incomparable Verlaine.”

Dowson recognising in himself something of the destructive intensity he associated with Verlaine · Letter to Arthur Symons, 5 July 1896

“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.”

An unusually direct description of his pursuit of sound, atmosphere and suggestion over explicit meaning · Letter to Victor Plarr, c. 1891

“£10 is a chimerical sum to me; but let us prepare our garland for the day, surely it must come, when this impecunious tyranny is overworn.”

Balancing financial hardship with optimism about eventually publishing their poetry together · Letter to Victor Plarr, c. 1891

“I smoke — smoke — smoke — read some — & think not at all.”

A wonderfully compressed picture of an idle holiday and deliberate escape from thought · Letter to Victor Plarr from the Norfolk Broads, undated, c. 1892–93

“London on a gala day... makes me think of an ugly, fat, vulgar old woman putting on the graces of coquetry.”

A vivid and caustic image of metropolitan display and social pretension · Letter to Victor Plarr, July 1893

“I would this play were done: half of it is completed and I have seven days more, but the second half is mightily oppressing me.”

A familiar writer's complaint about the strain of finishing commissioned work · Letter to Victor Plarr, 24 October 1892

“I have been frightfully busy, having rashly undertaken to make a little Pierrot play in verse for Peters... So until this period of severe mental agony be past, I can go nowhere.”

Turning the pressure of writing to a deadline into typically theatrical self-mockery · Letter to Victor Plarr, 24 October 1892

“I have made an endeavour to-day to read the Philoktetes; compassing about 50 lines; it's a distinct grind but I think necessary, if one is not altogether to lose the habit of Greek.”

A candid glimpse of the discipline Dowson thought necessary to maintain his classical learning · Letter to Arthur Moore, 1890

“I confess Our Lady of the Seven Hills encroaches on me, in these latter days.”

A characteristically poetic description of his increasing attraction to Roman Catholicism · Letter to Arthur Moore, May 1891

“I am afraid, my dear, I am being driven to Rome in self-defence. Vulgarity, sentimentality, crudity: isn't there an effectual protest against it all?”

Expressing the aesthetic and intellectual impulses drawing Dowson towards Roman Catholicism · Letter to Arthur Moore, May 1891

“Personally I think them the finest prose I have met with outside Pater.”

Placing John Henry Newman's prose alongside Walter Pater at the summit of Dowson's literary admiration · Letter to Arthur Moore, May 1891, on Newman's writings

“The subtilty, the tact of omission, the morbidezza! My Last Duchess, par exemple, is pure Henry James. I must have read it a dozen times before to-day: but I have only just appreciated the full subtilty of it. It is wonderful.”

An enthusiastic response to Browning's dramatic technique and art of implication · Letter to Arthur Moore, c. 1890

“Poetry, when it came, was an outburst, a digression.”

Capturing Dowson's sense that poetry arrived spontaneously rather than through deliberate literary planning · Conversation recalled by W. R. Thomas

“He was a master of both prose and verse... his prose better than his verse, as mine is.”

Dowson comparing himself with Poe and reiterating his preference for his own prose · Conversation with Frank Harris, as recalled by Harris

“The last vagary of my most modern Muse — of Montparnasse — or should I say Montmartre? Its obscurity, I may remark is designed.”

A playful acknowledgement that obscurity could be a deliberate artistic technique · Letter to Arthur Moore, 20 July 1891

“I have been writing verses, in the manner of the French symbolists: verses making for mere sound, and music, with just a suggestion of sense, or hardly that; a vague Verlainesque emotion.”

A concise statement of Dowson's attraction to musicality and suggestion in Symbolist verse · Letter to Arthur Moore, 20 March 1891

Pronunciation

Also Known As

Definition

Detailed Definition

Example

Additional Notes

Related Terms