Katharine Tynan as the Source of Lionel Johnson ‘Barstool’ Myth in Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)

Abstract

Scholars of both fin-de-siecle and modernist literature will be familiar with the portrait of the ‘1890 s generation’ found in Ezra Pound’s semi-autobiographical poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Among the narratives recounted by ‘Monsieur Verog’ in the poem (a character based on the poet and librarian Victor Plarr), the story of poet and critic Lionel Johnson falling off a barstool to his death is the most well-known and often repeated: For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub …1 Pound’s portrait anticipates W. B. Yeats’s account of the doomed ‘tragic generation’ in his 1922 autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil. Indeed, several scholars have identified Yeats as a likely source for Pound’s fallacious representation of Johnson, who in fact died due to a series of strokes.2 Russell...