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
Poet Lore In its first few decades, "Poet Lore" published the works of such renowned writers as Rabindranath Tagore, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Frederick Mistral, Stephane Mallarmé, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Jose Echegaray, Hermann Hesse, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Emma Lazarus, and Sara Teasdale. Award-winning American poets whose early work (in some cases their first published poems) appeared in the pages of "Poet Lore" include Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Colette Inez, R. T. Smith, D. Nurkse, John Balaban, Carolyn Forché, Alice Fulton, Dana Gioia, Pablo Medina, Kim Addonizio, David Baker, Carl Phillips, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Poet