Decadence & Aestheticism - Literary Movements, British Poets - Literary Biography
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Overview
Ernest Dowson was one of the major poets of the romantic late Victorian Decadent period." "Madder Music, Stronger Wine, the first full biography for 50 years, examines Dowson's obsessions and explores his life and work in the context of the social mores and attitudes of his era. Jad Adams explores Dowson's passions to show how the poet's strange delights and sexual excess were worked into his lyrical verse. It provides insights into the bohemian circles of London and Paris in the fin de siecle period and the bizarre and outrageous characters who made up 'the Decadents'.Editorials
New York Times
Adams's artful, assured biography illuminates his subject with penetrating understanding and sensitivity.Los Angeles Times
well-researched, sympathetic and unusually well-written...Adams has made Dowson's life colorful, affecting and absorbing. His approach is exemplary: neither censorious nor adulatory...He has a bedrock common sense that enables him to portray Dowson and his decadent friends with a pinch of salt.Sherie Posesorski
Jad Adams, who has written a book on Indian politics and another on Tony Benn, illuminates, with penetrating understanding and sensitivity, how life presented Dowson ''with suffering, and he returned it as beauty.'' ...Adams's artful, assured biography is a moving evocation of the sadly prophetic truth of one of Dowson's most quoted lines, ''They are not long, the days of wine and roses.''—New York Times Book Review
Book Details
Published
January 24, 2000
Publisher
London ; I.B. Tauris ; 2000.
Pages
288
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781860644702