Ernest Dowson is frequently considered to be the archetypal Decadent poet, the quintessence of 1890s writing, as much because of the details of his life as for the nature of his art. He is taken to represent the self-destructive figure who writes lyrics lamenting the loss of a virginal ideal and who is destroyed by his own self-consciousness and the realization that his ideal is both impossible and necessary. Although it ignores his capacity for hard work, in some ways the description is not far from the mark; but he considered his main interest to be prose rather than poetry ("I have never done any more than play with verse," he wrote to his friend Charles Sayle on 1 April 1889), and he indeed put a lot of effort into crafting stories in which ideas that find expression in his poems also shape a distinctive, delicate, and memorable prose, until...