Lionel Johnson
Lionel Pigot Johnson (15 March 1867 – 4 October 1902) was an English poet, essayist and critic.
Johnson was born in Broadstairs, Kent, England in 1867 and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1890. He became a Catholic convert in June 1891. Also in June 1891 Johnson introduced his cousin Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas to his friend Oscar Wilde. He later repudiated Wilde in "The Destroyer of a Soul" (1892), deeply regretting initiating what became the highly scandalous love affair between the two men.
In 1893 he published what some would consider his greatest work, "Dark Angel". During his lifetime were published: The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), Poems (1895), and Ireland and Other Poems (1897).
He was one of the Rhymers' Club, and cousin to Olivia Shakespear (who dedicated her novel The False Laurel to him). Johnson lived a solitary life in London, struggling with alcoholism and repressed homosexuality. He died of a stroke in 1902, after either a fall in the street, or a fall from a barstool in the Green Dragon on Fleet Street.
“Come! our world is done:For all the witchery of the world is fled,And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.”
“While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.”
“Mine is the sultry sunset when the skiesTremble with strange, intolerable thunder:And at the dead of an hushed night, these eyesDraw down the soaring oracles winged with wonder”