In one of Ernest Dowson's numerous letters to his friend and literary collaborator, Arthur Moore, he writes: ‘I have passed the week, in a consuming ennui, tristesse, spleen, and nostalgia of everything.’ Later on he concludes: ‘A sense of perfect desolation about – damp, decay dreariness: incapacity to meet all possible events: one's mind grows as grey as the river!’ (DL, 189–90). These are the themes and moods that permeate Dowson's poetry. Unlike Wilde's mannered affectation, Dowson's poetry communicates a sense of unmediated sincerity and authenticity; and unlike Symons’ fleshly materialism, it exhibits a withdrawal to the muted, inert spaces of the mind. So how is Dowson's work related to the central set of the paradoxes of Decadence explored in this book? How are mortal existence and the senses in Dowson reconciled with artificiality? Of course, his carefully mannered lyrics distil varieties of art for art's sake in their delicate and precieux prosody and imagery; Dowson is as obsessed as Wilde is in featuring the exotic mot. But while Wilde hoards in excess, Dowson (as well as Symons), as Nick Freeman examined in a recent essay, showcases the obscure term in a poetic landscape of ‘attenuation’ (2013: 96).

In a way, the arduous relationship between sensuousness and artifice is more perverse in Dowson, because the poet articulates a nonmergence between these two categories. He dwells on a radical poetics of possibility, impossibility and wish-fulfilment. His lyrics never gain traction since all drama can only be suggested within the mutable, unstable realms of imagination. But why do sensuality and artifice not meet in Dowson's work? Dowson's life and art were famously affected by Arthur Schopenhauer's materialist pessimism.