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 Dickey (poet) a poem about (or around) Mark Rothko’s painting Yellow Band or a prose poem about 'Mowing the Lawn' that pauses with Husserl’s phenomenology, Dickey’s poetry is grounded in a recognition that, to quote Sherwood Anderson, 'each truth [is] a composite of a great many vague thoughts,' all equally beautiful and disturbing, somber and happy." Prose poet Nin Andrews (author of twelve poetry collections) writes of Dickey's "They Say This Is How Death Came into the World" that it is "seductively inventive, charmingly clever and seriously witty. The pleasures offered by Paul Dickey’s quirky and irreverent meditations are utterly irresistible." Dickey