4                                        G. A. Cevasco

defending himself from attacks real and imaginary than he gave to
literature.

Douglas, nonetheless, was a highly capable poet who wrote some
works still worthy of consideration, especially those found in his
 

!MlifeTA,
 

Winchester College from the Warden's Garden
 

City of the Soul {IS99) ind Sonnets (1900). That his carefully crafted
verse failed to attract the critical reception he thought it deserved
troubled him deeply. The attention accorded Eliot, Pound, the
Sitwells, and other so-called "moderns" in the decades between the
Wars, he was certain, had been misdirected. The spotlight should
have fallen on his Complete Poems (1928). Douglas never could admit
to himself that he was essentially a nineties poet whose gifts did not
survive into the twentieth century.

Patrick Braybrook's Lord Alfred Douglas: His Life and Work (1913)
and William Freeman's The Life of Lord Alfred Douglas (1948) are
both well-written and quite readable biographies, but neither did
much for Douglas's reputation. Nor did Rupen Croft-Cooke's
Bosie (1963), a rather captious and belittling study, treat its subject
as a creative artist. The definitive biography, consequendy, remains
to be written. Whoever undertakes the task will of course have to