John Gray (poet) French, German, Latin, music and art. In 1882 he passed the Civil Service exams and, five years later, the University of London matriculation exams. He joined the Foreign Office where he became a librarian. Gray is best known today as an aesthetic poet of the 1890s and as a friend of Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He was also a talented translator, bringing works by the French Symbolists Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Arthur Rimbaud into English, often for the first time. He is purported to be the inspiration behind the title character in Wilde's "The
William Morrison (poet) William Morrison (poet) William (Billy) Morrison was born in County Antrim, Ireland, in a small village near Glengormley, called at Mallusk on 14 July 1881. He was a gifted poet and nature lover and his moving accounts of rural Mallusk remain particularly poignant today in light of the increasing industrialization of the area. Billy's original home was Old Bush House, a Blacksmiths Forge, located in one of the Barron Family's Dairy Fields. It was known as 'Frank’s Field' after his blacksmith grandfather and was opposite the Old Scullion’s Road where the Northern Bank is today. His grandfather Francis Morrison married