Lionel Johnson – Poetry and Prose

Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) was perhaps the finest poet and critic of the English fin de siècle. A major influence on Yeats, Pound and Eliot, admired by Harold Bloom and Paul Elmer More, his mysterious life and death, and association with the Decadent movement, have given rise to numerous legends. Yet in spite of his importance to the English Catholic Revival and Irish Literary Renaissance, and the incontestable beauty and quality of his work, he has been neglected. This landmark anthology – which brings together for the first time the best of his poetry and prose (much of it uncollected), together with a generous selection of unpublished correspondence and a full critical and biographical introduction – restores Johnson to his rightful place, at the heart of the 1890s.