Writer | Pianist | Romanticist | Votary of Gothic literature | Devoted animal lover | Author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021).
Joined June 2016
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I was honored to discover yesterday on the 200th anniversary of George MacDonald’s birth that my poem “The Faery Wood” was selected for the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for this year’s MacDonald-themed Brian Nisbet Poetry Award.
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
—Oscar Wilde, “The Canterville Ghost”
Today is Wilde’s birthday
Oscar Wilde’s lines hold a special significance for me and I post them yearly. Though the lines are a bit dark, the passage comes from “The Canterville Ghost”, which is really a comedy and parody of sorts. The painting, based on some rather morbid lines from a poem by Christina Rossetti, is by Edward Robert Hughes.
“I will cut adrift... I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—I will see the Southern hills; I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October… I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need empty fields.”
—Virginia Woolf, 15 October 1930
“My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you… You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving… ‘Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearls.”
—John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819
clayfjohnson.com/writings/jo…
Clay Franklin Johnson retweeted
A worthwhile read
For the anniversary of Shelley's funeral today read 'Gothicized, Glamourized, Mythologized: The Funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley' by @clayfjohnson. Shelley was cremated on 16 August 1822 on a 'a magnificent extent of seashore' near Viareggio, Italy. gothickeatspress.com/shelley…
“I am living today in yesterday: I was in a complete fascination all day. I feel myself at your mercy. Write me ever so few lines and tell me you will never forever be less kind to me than yesterday—You dazzled me.”
—John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 11 October 1819
I’m honored to have “A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem” published by Pub 518. It was written for someone beloved to me who died last December. I wrote about some of the inspirations (including bits about Wuthering Heights) in an interview here: pub518.com/post/droids-drago…
The lines above are only a small part of the poem. I wrote the piece in a more prose-like style, unusual for me, which I describe below. The “relic” was based on a little dragon figurine from the Maryland Renaissance Festival.
The book is available here: books2read.com/u/bx2XQl
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Spirits of the Dead”
Today’s the anniversary of Poe’s death.
Tennyson’s elegy “Break, Break, Break” has been on my mind lately. From Richard Holmes’s biography:
“What is breaking now is not the sea, but his heart… This ceaseless melancholy of the tides, this eternal background soundtrack of extinction, would echo throughout his life.”
Clay Franklin Johnson retweeted
A worthy campaign to raise funds to conserve the headstone of pre-Raphaelite artist Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927) before the centenary of her death next year. Have a look at the site and do consider contributing. gofundme.com/f/marie-spartal…
A campaign to fundraise to have Pre-Raph artist Marie Spartali Stillman’s headstone conserved in time for the centenary of her death next year-
gofundme.com/f/marie-spartal…
Clay Franklin Johnson retweeted
Meet @ClayFJohnson author & poet. His poem, 'A Relic of Dragonalia' is featured in the 2026 anthology, Droids & Dragons.
pub518.com/post/droids-drago…
Amazon - eBook a.co/d/00u5r8x5 & paperback a.co/d/0dq3RWK6
#newrelease #fyp #fantasy #bookX #reading #poetry
Apologies for my atrocious absence this past month, and for not responding to emails, but life has become unbearably complicated. The loss of a beloved dog last September, the recent deaths of friends, including the strange loss of years-long friendships, and the miseries of being inspired by nothing and no one have all made this a devil of a year. The “employments” of Percy Bysshe Shelley from an 1819 letter sound marvelous and much needed, but his bit about friends and social enjoyments being the “alpha and the omega of existence” speaks to me the most at the moment. “How we prize what we despised when present” are unfortunately true words.
Clay Franklin Johnson retweeted
Dr. Polidori, author of “The Vampyre”, was buried in Old St. Pancras Churchyard #OTD 29 August 1821, five days after his tragic suicide. His grave was moved in the 1860s (railway construction), but his gravestone could be among those placed around The Hardy Tree, pictured here.
“I now sprang forward, with my sword in my hand. The black creature suddenly contracted towards the foot of the bed, glided over it, and with a glare of skulking ferocity and horror fixed on me, I saw Millarca.”
—Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
Le Fanu was born 212 years ago today.
Irish writer of Gothic fiction Sheridan Le Fanu was born #OTD 28 August 1814 in Dublin. His vampire novella Carmilla (1871-72) had a profound influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These illustrations for Carmilla are by D.H. Friston and Michael Fitzgerald. @IrishGothic
Clay Franklin Johnson retweeted
For the anniversary of Shelley's funeral today read 'Gothicized, Glamourized, Mythologized: The Funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley' by @clayfjohnson. Shelley was cremated on 16 August 1822 on a 'a magnificent extent of seashore' near Viareggio, Italy. gothickeatspress.com/shelley…
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “earthly remains” were cremated today, 16 August 1822. It was an appropriately classical, pagan ceremony with offerings of spice, wine and frankincense—even Keats’s last book of poems, found on Shelley’s body, was added to the fire.
gothickeatspress.com/shelley…
Today is Walter Crane’s 181st birthday. He painted the graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1872-73. Of his time within the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Crane wrote that “one might almost feel the spirits of the poets still haunted the place”.
clayfjohnson.com/poems/keats…
