This volume will reintroduce a significant poet of the nineteenth century to a modern audience which has forgotten, probably, that this distinguished Irish authority on Shakespeare, Goethe and Shelly thought of himself as a poet first. Our perception of Dowden today is that he was a better critic than he was a poet; and in the main, this judgment may be sound, but it goes untested due to the scarcity of his poetic works. Closer to the truth, as I suspect most readers will find, many of the lyrics from his first volume of poetry, Poems (1876), are astonishingly good and warrant comparison with his betters— Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, the Rossettis—poets whose names were often cited in press reviews of Dowden's early poetry. Without the commitment he made to his academic post at Trinity College, Dublin, he might have become another Meredith, given his obsession with the sonnet and use of lyric sequences to probe the essences of subject-matter with characteristic irony. Even so, his poetry was prominently featured in Robert Bridges and Contemporary Poets (pp. 81-98), Volume 8 of Alfred Miles's series The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, c. 1891-1906)—an infl uential tome which conferred canonical stature to a broader fi eld of poets than we tend to observe from our distant perspective.

The verses selected by James A. Noble for Miles's anthology bear up very well to the test of time—poems from narrative sequences such as “Heroines;” shorter occasional lyrics such as “The Corn-crake,” “Burdens,” “In the Cathedral Close,” and “Renunciants;” and sonnets from the Rossettian sequences “The Inner Life,” “In the Garden,” and “In the Galleries.” John Todhunter and Edmund Gosse, represented in the same volume, were close personal friends of Dowden's. W. B. Yeats and William Watson, who as younger poets were gradually promoted from the “Ac Etiam” section of the book when their reputations sailed during later editions, were mentored by Dowden. While in Watson's case, this master-to-apprentice relationship with Dowden must be shared with Tennyson, Dowden's relationship with W. B. Yeats offers most to English literary history.