Madder Music, Stronger Wine: the Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent
Jad Adams<BR. (IB Tauris, £12.95)

I first came across Dowson in a section of Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley". The narrator sits listening to "Monsieur Verog" (in reality, Dowson's old friend Victor Plarr), "among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones": "For two hours he talked of Galliflet; / Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club; / Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died/ By falling from a high stool in a pub... M. Verog, out of step with the decade, / Detached from his contemporaries, / Neglected by the young, / Because of these reveries."

Pound's literary instincts (but not his political ones, obviously) can generally be relied on. And if Dowson was good enough for him, then he should be good enough for you. He was good enough for T S Eliot, for how could "Prufrock" or "The Hollow Men" have been written without lyrics like this hovering at the back of his mind? "Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold, / To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust / Find end of labour, where's rest for the old, / Freedom to all from love and fear and lust. / Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold / Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust." Eliot, to his credit, acknowledged the influence. Still, Dowson seems deader than ever, a relic of 1890s decadence, all absinthe, aestheticism, prostitutes and seedy boarding-houses.

Yet there are a surprising number of websites devoted to his poetry. He lives on, for all that he and his kind were mocked by the bourgeoisie, devastatingly satirised by Max Beerbohm's creation, Enoch Soames, and indeed seemed, with the archness of their metaphors and the epicene frailty of their passions, to go out of their way to be remembered only as a footnote to literary history. Sneering at decadents has been good sport for middlebrows for a century now. Yet Yeats was an early member of the Rhymers' Club, and deferred to Dowson's talent; as did Wilde, who was always ready for a chat with him, for all their differences in stature and sexual predilection.

Dowson died in 1900 at the age of 32. The biographer keen to write a multi-volume life of Dowson will be disappointed, and Adams's work runs to a scant 211 closely printed pages, with index. As a teenager, Dowson had already found his poetic form and subject, namely the horror of living in a world in which girls died young. Jad Adams writes, with perhaps a touch of despair, for he is only on page 16: "The problem for a poet is that having touched upon such an absolute certainty so young, there is little more to write."

Yet Adams manages, with exemplary professionalism and dedication, to spin out an engrossing tale. Someone as on-the-edge as Dowson is always going to attract a good anecdote or two. (In France, a pissed Dowson started thumping a baker; the French magistrate hearing the case said: "If a poet might not beat a baker, what might he beat?") And he convinces us that he was good - not only as a poet, but as a type, as a person, in spite of everything. "Poor wounded, wonderful fellow that he was," wrote Wilde, "a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid upon his tomb, and rue, and myrtle too, for he knew what love is."