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
René Tavernier (poet) René Tavernier (poet) René Tavernier published his first poems before the Second World War in the "New French Review", immediately noticed by Jean Wahl, which brought him recognition by Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. A friend of a friend of Vladimir Jankélévitch, the French philosopher and poet fled to the United States after having escaped from the Drancy camp where he was interned. Joining writers and journalists during the war led him to Lyon in the neighborhood where he directed Montchat Confluences - A journal on "Literature and Arts" - founded by Jacques Aubenque between July 1941 and 1943. It