Ernest Dowson was born in Lee, London, in 1867. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, a poet and politician who became Premier of New Zealand and had allegedly been the subject of Robert Browning’s poem “Waring.” Dowson attended The Queen’s College, Oxford, but left in March 1888 without obtaining a degree.

In November 1888, he started work with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, east London, which had been established by the poet’s grandfather. He led an active social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls and taking the performers to dinner. He was also working assiduously at his writing during this time. He was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, which included W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson. He was a contributor to such literary magazines as The Yellow Book and The Savoy.

In 1889, aged 23, Dowson became infatuated with the 11 year old Adelaide “Missie” Foltinowicz, daughter of a Polish restaurant owner; in 1893 he unsuccessfully proposed to her. To Dowson’s despair, Adelaide was eventually to marry a tailor.

In August 1894, Dowson’s father, who was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895. Soon after her death, Dowson began to decline rapidly. The publisher Leonard Smithers gave him an allowance to live in France and write translations, but he returned to London in 1897 (where he stayed with the Foltinowicz family, despite the transfer of Adelaide’s affections).

This latter poem was first published in The Second Book of the Rhymer’s Club in 1894, and was noticed by Richard Le Gallienne in his “Wanderings in Bookland” column in The Idler, volume 9.

In 1899, Robert Sherard found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford, where Sherard was living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherard’s cottage where he died at age 32. He had become a Catholic in 1892 and was interred in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries. After Dowson’s death, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb and rue and myrtle too for he knew what love was”. Wilde himself was dead before the end of the year.

John Ireland included a setting of “I Was Not Sorrowful (Spleen)” from Verses (1896) in his 1912 song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer.

In anticipation of the anniversary of Dowson’s birth on 2 August 2010, his grave, which had fallen derelict and been vandalized, was restored. The unveiling and memorial service were publicised in the local (South London Press) and national (BBC Radio 4 and the Times Literary Supplement) British press, and dozens paid posthumous tribute to the poet 110 years after his death. In the Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, a 1919 memoir written by Arthur Symons, Symons described Dowson as, “… a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius … There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally … He had the pure lyric gift, unweighed or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion…”