Clay Franklin Johnson
@ClayFJohnson
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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
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.
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Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River and Castle Kostverloren (1647) by Aert van der Neer. This is one of Van der Neer’s “nocturnes”, a genre that he mastered. In this oil on wood, the clouds give way to reveal a full moon among a “fiery glow” of sky.
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Oh absolutely! 🖤 One of the great Gothic tales in literary history, although incredibly sad and tragic—Mary first had difficulty obtaining her beloved’s heart from Leigh Hunt. Shelley’s heart was apparently discovered in Mary’s travelling-desk a year after her death, wrapped in silk between the pages of the Pisa edition of Adonais, PB Shelley’s brilliant elegy on the death of John Keats. I wrote briefly about it in the final paragraphs in an essay about Shelley’s funeral:
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RT @ClayFJohnson: Artist, poet, and muse Elizabeth Siddal died #OTD 1862 at the age of 32 from an overdose of laudanum. Her widower Dante R…
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@DrSamGeorge1 Sam, I am so sorry that you never received my book! Really, I should have reached out first. And I did indeed send it to the university – School of Humanities. No need to purchase one for I’m happy to send you another. Just sent you a DM 🖤
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To those looking for last-minute ideas for @OGOMProject’s theme, I wrote a poem about the water-fairy Mélusine in 2021, inspired by Jean d’Arras’s narrative (c 1392), Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s poem The Fairy of the Fountains (1834), and A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990).
MERMAID CONFERENCE The deadline is approaching for abstracts for our 2025 conference 'Sea Changes: The fairytale Gothic of mermaids, selkies, and enchanted hybrids of ocean and river' 5-6 Sept . We'd love to hear from you by 7 Feb
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RT @ClayFJohnson: I’ve never been terribly fond of self-promotion, so I did not advertise my book nearly enough the first year it was publi…
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RT @ClayFJohnson: Ann Radcliffe is one of only a few authors whom I read every year, and I still find new inspiration with each reading. I’…
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“He approached, and perceived the Gothic remains of an abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom around.” —Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest She died #OTD 1823.
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Today, 6 February 1820, just three days after John Keats’s hemorrhage of “arterial blood” that had him declaring to his good friend Charles Brown that it was his “death-warrant”, Keats writes to his sister that he is now on the mend. He would tragically die just a year later.
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RT @ChawtonHouse: #OTD in 1792, Mary Robinson published her first novel, Vancenza. Robinson's celebrity status ensured that it had sold out…
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RT @ClayFJohnson: I don’t believe I’ve posted this one before, but this is a different version of an illustration to my poem “My Little Gre…
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RT @ClayFJohnson: “And I am not one to be fooled with the vanities of the common crowd. I will not see beauty where there is none. I will d…
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@heather_nanni These are great passages you have underlined, and you annotate quite similarly to the way I do — there are many pages in my books that are full of such stars/asterisks 🖤
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@Kulambq Without repeat poets, creating a list would be rather difficult – there are so many by Shelley I’ve come to love over the years, and several by Hopkins in recent months. But this is a great list. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is such a profound favorite of mine.
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