Ernest Dowson and the strategies of decadent desire

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Karen Alkalay-Gut

When shall men cease to suffer and desire? Ernest Dowson(1)

... my practice never gives me any tangible satisfaction unless it fits in a little while with my theory.... And yet what the devil is the good of a philosophy which doesn't save you from ennui? Ernest Dowson(2)

Dowson passes into modern poetry not only as a myth, but as poetry... For such reasons it is worth undergoing the somewhat lowering experience of reading through Dowson's poems. Frank Kermode(3)

Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. Terry Eagleton(4)

It has always been to the detriment of an understanding of Ernest Dowson's poetry that it is linked with the rather dreamy and decadent life conceived by his critics and followers. Dowson's poetry, so carefully grounded in literature, philosophy, dialogues and commentary on other poets and writers, is often limited by relating it to a life constructed to suit the image of the decadent. Contextualized and studied as verse, Dowson's poems often yield far more interesting insights into a unique and rather sophisticated approach to the possibilities and limits of poetry in his time.

But there are good reasons why a direct entrance to Dowson's poetry has been difficult to obtain. The subject matter, in particular, seems problematic for contemporary readers--the prevalent, oxymoronic themes of unrequited love and ideal religion appear archaic, artificial, neither concerned with the real world nor with the world of art. Thomas Swan derides the poet for his unconvincing poetic seductions: "He dared not argue too winningly because, had his love accepted his invitation, he could not have continued to respect her.... If Dowson and Herrick had wooed the same mistress, there would be little doubt of her choice."(5) In other words, Dowson is blamed for not being a Romantic or a Metaphysical, for writing poems of love that would not convince a beloved to succumb to him, that cannot fulfill realistic, extra-aesthetic, goals. In a similar vein Ward Briggs denigrates Dowson's poetry because it is imaginary and unconnected with a conventional love affair, noting that Propertius and Dowson differ in that "Propertius' love affair was real; Dowson's was largely, if not exclusively, fantasy."(6)

Not only is Dowson censured for preferring an unappealing approach to well-known poetic material. His imagery, redolent of earlier writers, is frequently considered shopworn. The roses and lilies Dowson employs are not new, as Vivian de Sola Pinto notes and, " ... certainly come from Swinburne's 'Dolores': they are bookish, hackneyed images bearing no vital relationship to the squalid dissipation of Soho in the eighteen-nineties. Indeed, much of Dowson's poetry is the result not of an exploration of the inner life but of wistful daydreaming...."(7) Given the pressing social realities of his time, Dowson's insistence on poetic rhetoric seems a serious flaw, an escape from individual responsibility.

These are fundamental objections, challenging both the innovative value and the ultimate significance of Dowson's poetry. Placed in the context of the second generation of the aesthetic movement, however, Dowson's concentration on conventional figures and unachievable ideals may make good sense. Within this context, his themes and imagery reveal a conscious deliberateness, one that begins with the assumption that we have all heard these subjects before, used these images, read and digested our Pater and French poetry, and discovered that they cannot provide solutions to the problems of meaning and felicity in the universe and in art.

What remains for Dowson is a palpable need in the human spirit for something more than the aesthetic or erotic pleasure proposed by the Pre-Raphaelites, or the empty world of commerce and progress described by the Naturalists, although no alternatives seem to exist which can be embraced wholeheartedly. The nostalgia for medieval and religious spheres and the actuality of a "grey" world, the "squalid dissipation of Soho" only serve to emphasize the gap between the ideals and present reality. The focus of concentration becomes the hunger which in itself proves the existence of the individual. "Desire," as Sartre has pointed out, "is consciousness."(8) Fulfillment of this hunger in this flawed and imitative world would prove only the banality of the hunger, and would, in fact, reduce the significance of the human spirit and negate existence.

This hunger permeates Dowson's work. It is central to an understanding of Dowson's themes and designs to conceive of all his subjects as irrelevant in themselves but as symbolic of this elusive and allusive hunger. For Dowson, the poetry of unrequited love allows the ennobling expression of emotions while denying the fatuousness of fulfillment: this approach, when applied to other aspects of life and poetry, creates a closed system in which all fulfillment, satisfaction, or achievement, must always be desired but never be achieved. The focus within this framework is on neither love nor art, but exclusively on the intensity of human desire as captured in poetic experience.(10)