Gray, John Henry

(1866-1934)

   Born in Woolwich, London, to a Nonconformist family, he converted to the Roman Catholic Church and was ordained in 1901. For many years he was priest in charge of St. Peter's, Edinburgh. He was a voluminous writer of poetry; many of his poems have a religious theme. He also translated the French poets Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. Oscar Wilde encouraged him to publish his first volume of poetry, Silverpoints, in 1893. His long poem The Flying Fish was published in the Dial in 1896, and republished in The Long Road in 1926. His novel Park: A Fantastic Story-set in the future-was published in 1932. Some of his other poems: "Act of Contrition," "And while the shepherds loitered, suddenly," "Adam of Saint Victor," "Fleurs: Imitated from the French of Stéphane Mallarmé," "Hymn to Saint Bernard," "Obedient to the Law, the Child is Brought," "On a Picture," "Parsifal Imitated from the French of Paul Verlaine," "The Barber," "The Emperor and the Bird," "The Long Road," "To Arthur Edmonds."

   Sources: English Poetry: Author Search. ChadwyckHealey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems of John Gray. Ian Fletcher, ed. ELT Press, 1988. The Victorian Sonnet (http://www.sonnets.org/victoria.htm).