Lionel Johnson: Poetry and Prose, Saint Austin Press hardcover with illustrated dust-jacket

Lionel Johnson: The Forgotten Poet of the Catholic Revival

  • THE FIRST ANTHOLOGY OF HIS BEST WORK – The finest of Lionel Johnson's poetry and prose, much of it never before collected.
  • EDITED BY ROBERT ASCH – Selected and edited by Robert Asch, co-editor of the Saint Austin Review.
  • UNPUBLISHED LETTERS – A generous selection of his correspondence, published for the first time.
  • FULL CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION – Restoring Johnson to his place in English literature.
  • ILLUSTRATED – With photographs and portraits of Johnson and his world.
  • MADE FOR READING – Sewn, green cloth, gilt-lettered spine, illustrated dust-jacket and a silk ribbon marker.

Every literary revival has its forgotten man. For the remarkable flowering of Catholic letters in England at the end of the nineteenth century, it is Lionel Johnson: admired by the best writers of his generation, an influence on the greatest poets of the next, and then, within a few decades of his death, almost entirely unread.

The poet

Johnson was born in 1867, educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and settled in London as a writer and critic. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1891. With W. B. Yeats and Ernest Dowson he belonged to the Rhymers' Club, the circle of young poets who met at the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street, and he did much to draw Yeats towards the Celtic and Catholic past that would mark his work. His poems — "The Dark Angel", "By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross", "Ireland" — are among the finest of the decade: grave, formal and full of a longing for the old faith and the old order. His criticism, including a pioneering study of Thomas Hardy, was as fine as his verse.

His life was short and troubled. He died in October 1902, at the age of thirty-five, after a fall in Fleet Street, and the legends that gathered around him have often obscured the work itself.

Our anthology

Edited by Robert Asch, this is the first book to bring together the best of Johnson's poetry and prose, much of it never collected before, with a generous selection of his unpublished letters and a full critical and biographical introduction that sets him back where he belongs, at the heart of the English Catholic literary revival. It is illustrated with photographs and portraits, sewn and bound in green cloth with a gilt-lettered spine, an illustrated dust-jacket and a silk ribbon marker.

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