Description
Book SynopsisErnest Dowson: Lyric Lives is the first full-length critical study of this canonical writer to appear in English. It challenges the many myths that have surrounded Dowson''s life and work for more than a century, contending that, in his distinct theory of muse-fired inspiration; his authentic Catholic confessionalism; his deep love of France, its literary tradition, and its culture; his prolonged battle with tuberculosis; and his final abandonment of creative writing, Dowson is among the most engaged and representative artists of this fascinating era. Far from the moribund dream-lover of legend, Dowson, in fact, led an engrossing and robust existence, while practicing a vigorous, sullen craft; he wrote about the subjects which poets have always written about, with inimitable style and incorrigible élan. Ernest Dowson presents a chronological and comprehensive series of generative new readings of his work, situated in relation to that of his notable contemporaries, as well as the pressi
Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Muses' Sterner Laws 1: The Right Type of Girl 2: Love (In the Shade) 3: The All Absorbing Subject 4: Still Point of the Turning World 5: Dowson's Lunatic Asylum 6: The Reign of Reverie 7: Betwixt the Bounds of Life and Death 8: The End of All the Songs Afterlives: In Epilogue
