Ernest Dowson — a remark

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“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

About Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867–23 February 1900

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…

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