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
Walter Kennedy (poet) form, register and subject from the "Flyting", his second longest work. There are four other works, all much shorter but still highly various in genre: Walter Kennedy was an acclaimed poet in his lifetime. Both Gavin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay paid tribute to him as a fellow makar in their works. The twentieth-century poet William Neill, interested in Kennedy's South Ayrshire roots and his possible role as a Gaelic speaker in the Scottish court, has incorporated tributes to the makar into his own writing. One example is the Gaelic poem "Chuma Bhaltair Cinneide" ("In Memory of Walter Kennedy") which