Johnson, Lionel Pigot

Related Category: English Literature, 19th cent.: Biographies

1867–1902, British poet and critic, b. Broadstairs, Kent, educated at Oxford. He lived an ascetic, scholarly life in London, converting to Roman Catholicism in 1891. His keen interest in the Irish literary renaissance is reflected in many of his poems. As a whole Johnson's poetry is spare and austere, often spiritual in content and deeply emotional. His works include Poems (1895) and Ireland and Other Poems (1897), and a critical work, The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894). Johnson died of a fall at the age of 35.

See his complete poems, ed. by I. Fletcher (1953); also his essays and critical papers, ed. by T. Whittemore (1912, repr. 1968).