Lionel Pigot Johnson

Lionel Pigot Johnson 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.

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

Johnson, Lionel Pigot (1867–1902), became an influential man of letters, and one of the notable Catholic converts of his day. His The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894) was one of the first full-length studies of Hardy to appear. His Poems appeared in 1895, Ireland and Other Poems in 1897, and Post Liminium, a posthumous collection of essays, in 1911. There is an account of his personality and decline into alcoholism in Yeats's Autobiographies. See also art for art's sake.