Poet and art critic, the son of a Methodist Primary School principal in Belfast. He was born in Belfast on 28 October 1907 and educated at Methodist College and Queen's University. He was Keeper of Art at the Ulster Museum, Belfast 1930-57 and for a time writer-in-residence at Queen's University. He was a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. His many volumes of poetry gave voice to the Ulster Protestant identity and attempted to define the relation of the planter stock to Ireland's past and present. His sonnet sequence Kites in Spring - a Belfast Boyhood (1980) captures a Belfast Methodism of the early twentieth century, although he himself became agnostic. He died in Belfast on 27 June 1987.