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
Paul Kane (poet) cryptic as Emily Dickinson." "There are so many influences and traditions underpinning this work, yet it speaks to a reader with simplicity and clarity, so that one comes not merely to enjoy, but to value its irony and its philosophical refinement." Over the course of his career, Paul Kane has won a variety of awards for poetry and teaching. While he was a student at Yale, he won the university's McLaughlin English Prize in 1970, and in 1973, he was appointed Class Poet. In 1984, he won a Fulbright Post-Graduate Grant, and in 1985, the Schweitzer Prize Preceptorship in Poetics