Lionel Johnson

Lionel Johnson (born March 15, 1867, Broadstairs, Kent, Eng.—died Oct. 4, 1902, London) was an English poet and critic who was notable for his fastidious and wistful lyrical poems but is mainly remembered as a typical representative of the “tragic generation” of the 1890s, which suffered from fin-de-siècle decadence and melancholy.

Johnson studied at Winchester College and at New College, Oxford, and then went to London to pursue a literary career and to work as a writer and critic for a number of periodicals. He early became an alcoholic and a recluse and suffered from spiritual malaise. He converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1891. Johnson wrote the first solid study of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and his Poetical Works were edited in 1915 by Ezra Pound. He died at age 35 after falling on a public street and fracturing his skull. His friend William Butler Yeats left a touching portrait of him in Autobiographies.