Ernest 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 pressin