SOURCE: "The Quintessence of Dowsonism: 'The Dying of Francis Donne'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XI, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 45-51.

In the following essay, Cushman describes "The Dying of Francis Donne" as "a masterly delineation of the psychology of dying" in which its protagonist succeeds in escaping "the tyranny of time only by intellectual detachment and by death. "

The evidence suggests that Ernest Dowson thought more highly of his prose than his poetry,¹ but that has not been the verdict of the world. If Dowson has an audience at all these days, it is for his frail, languorous poetry, not for his stories, sketches, or translations, or for the two novels he collaborated on. For the most part the stories and sketches are interesting period pieces, pale, delicate variations on Dowson's characteristic themes of lost love and the tragic gap between the flux of life and the...