In the early 1890s Ernest Dowson created lyrics that rival even the most perfect creations of the seventeenth-century English poets. Already fatally ill in his twenties, he wrote for only a half dozen years and had virtually completed his contribution to poetry before the publication of his first collection of poems, Verses (1896). His 114 published poems illustrate the impact on fin de siècle British poetry of both the French impressionist painters after Claude Monet and the French symbolist poets after Charles Baudelaire--especially Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud. Dowson followed these French artists and writers in their desires to use precise images based upon the impressions of the senses and to weaken the barriers that separate poetry from "pure music" and from abstract art--barriers imposed primarily by the literary demands for reason and grammatical structure. Like them, he sought to emphasize sound and...