Lionel (Pigot) Johnson | Biography

Lionel Johnson is as likely to be remembered for what others have said about him as he is for his own work. A sad, tortured figure, his life was among the more lurid of that group of 1890s poets whom W.B. Yeats called "the tragic generation," but while the Johnson myth is likely to remain in the memory, the reader should not be blind to the merits of his poetry. For Yeats, who commemorated him in "The Grey Rock" as one of the "poets with whom I learned my trade," he was a tormented figure, a man "much falling," who nonetheless "brooded on sanctity," as Yeats wrote of him in "In memory of Major Robert Gregory." American philosopher George Santayana noted that while Johnson was at Oxford he would eat nothing but eggs in the morning, supporting himself on tea and cigarettes for the rest of the day, while in...
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