“The last vagary of my most modern Muse — of Montparnasse — or should I…” — Ernest Dowson | V2Melody

“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

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…

More by Ernest Dowson

Poems by Ernest Dowson

More remarks by Ernest Dowson

“My latest Valueless Villanelle I enclose you. It has been sent to Atalanta and I await its return with a philosophic resignation which I would I could muster equally where my prose is in question.”

Showing Dowson's habitual self-deprecation about poetry and his greater emotional investment in prose · Letter to Arthur Moore, 1 June 1890

“I have a sonnet in this month's Temple Bar: that is all and that is nothing for I have never done any more than play with verse.”

Revealing how lightly Dowson professed to regard the art that later made him famous · Letter to Charles Sayle, 1 April 1889

“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