New Zealand poet who rejected the rural themes and parochial nationalism of traditional New Zealand poetry in favour of the themes of everyday suburban life and ordinary human relationships.

After attending Wellington Teachers' Training College, Johnson worked as a schoolteacher, journalist, and editor of several publications, including the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook (1951–64), New Zealand Parent and Child (1955–59), Numbers (1954–60), and Antipodes New Writing (1987). His early poetry, which is often characterized as being abstract, included such collections as Stanza and Scene (1945), The Sun Among the Ruins (1951), and New Worlds for Old (1957). His constant poetic output became increasingly concrete and colloquial, and his later works included Bread and a Pension (1964), Onion (1972), Coming and Going (1982), and Winter Apples (1984). From 1968 to 1980, Johnson lived overseas and traveled widely; in Land Like a Lizard (1970), written during an extended stay in Papua New Guinea, he examined the spread of urban society and the attendant loss of innocence. He received the first New Zealand Book Award for poetry for Fires and Patterns (1975).