Celebrating a lost Victorian voice.
Lionel Johnson: Poetry and Prose
Robert Asch
Saint Austin Press, £29.99, 544 pages
When Lionel Johnson was 31 and stricken with alcoholism, his friend Stopford Brooke described him as “mournful and decaying… young, but also very old”. Since his days at Winchester College, Johnson’s scores of friends had noted his arresting precocity and love of being intoxicated (with poetry as well as alcohol, and frequently together). Having earned the admiration of such poets as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Johnson would die of a stroke at 35, leaving behind an extensive literary corpus, most of which quickly fell into obscurity.
