Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of
Ernest Dowson
Ernest Dowson was one of the major poets of the romantic late-Victorian Decadent period. He died, penniless in 1900 at the age of 32. His life is both a story of doomed love and one of a man’s struggle to create beauty in the face of adversity: Dowson was an alcoholic and a severe depressive who created much of his best work when suffering from the tuberculosis which was to kill him when he was a homeless vagabond owning nothing but a tattered manuscript book of verse.
Join us as Jad weaves through his tragically short life story in a special evening interspersed with his poetry.
We welcome Sydenham based historian and author Jad Adams back to Kirkdale for an evening of decadent discussion.
In this fascinating new version of his classic biography: Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson – Jad breathes new life into the fading legend of a greatly gifted poet, it is a book “full of alcohol, art and unrestrained sexual intercourse” and an exemplary approach “neither censorious nor adulatory”.
