Ernest Dowson, one of the major poets of the romantic late Victorian Decadent period, died in 1900 at the age of 32, an alcoholic and a severe depressive. He created much of his best work when he was suffering from the tuberculosis which was finally to kill him. This little understood major figure of the Victorian literary world wrote some of the most quoted lyrics in English verse in the company of contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. This full biography explores Dowson’s strange delights and sexual excesses while providing fascinating insights into the bohemian circles of London and Paris in the romantic fin de siecle period, and the bizarre and outrageous characters who made up ""the Decadents"".