Lionel Johnson

Born in Broadstairs, Kent, on March 15, 1867, Lionel Johnson was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1890. He became a writer and critic in London, and sources consistently describe him as an English poet and critic whose work often carried a wistful, finely crafted tone.

Johnson converted to Roman Catholicism in 1891, and that spiritual commitment became a strong thread in both his life and writing. He also wrote on Irish themes and was associated with the literary world of the 1890s; during his lifetime he published books including The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), Poems (1895), and Ireland and Other Poems (1897). His poem Dark Angel is often singled out as his best-known work.

Later readers have often remembered him as a gifted but tragic figure of the decadent 1890s. He struggled with alcoholism, and he died in London on October 4, 1902, at the age of thirty-five after a fall that fractured his skull. Even with a small body of work, he left behind a distinct voice: thoughtful, sorrowful, and intensely inward.