Of cut roses and broken hearts...

[dr_bathybius]

I find his poems to be an amalgam of the mournful, lovelorn work of John Dowland, mixed with the very best of the English Décadents. He is tasteful and always has an eye toward harmonious aesthetics within his poems, which makes them all the more devastating, considering their fatal tone.

XXXVI. "A cut rose set in water, poor sick

Comments

[algabal]

Barlas' Love Sonnets rank high among my favorite works in all of English literature! I find that fatalistic tone you identify to be impossible beautiful. I thought Karl Beckson's choice of Barlas' poems in his anthology of English aesthetes and decadents to be uninspired: he chose the poems by Barlas which contained the most explicitly Decadent tropes which somewhat masked his importance.

I created his Wikipedia article about a year ago based on the scanty information I found in various books. I still don't know enough.

John Barlas

[dr_bathybius]