Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson was an English poet, novelist, translator, and short-story writer associated with the Decadent movement and the Rhymers’ Club. The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson gathers his verse and fiction with a memoir by his friend Arthur Symons, preserving work produced during a brief but influential literary career. Dowson contributed to The Yellow Book and The Savoy, wrote the verse play The Pierrot of the Minute, and collaborated on novels with Arthur Moore. His translations brought French writing, including works by Émile Zola, into English. Poems such as Vitae Summa Brevis and Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae supplied phrases that later entered popular culture, notably “days of wine and roses” and “gone with the wind.” The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson shows the range behind those remembered lines, placing lyrical poems beside stories and Symons’s personal account of a writer deeply connected to London’s fin-de-siècle literary circles.