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
Clarinda (poet) Clarinda (poet) Clarinda was the pen name used by an anonymous Peruvian poet, generally assumed to be a woman, who wrote in the early 17th Century. The only work attributed to her is the long poem "Discourse in Praise of Poetry" ("Discurso en loor de la poesía"), which was printed in Seville in 1608. She is one of very few female, Spanish-speaking colonial-period poets whose work has not been lost. Thus, she is often read in partnership with Mexico's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and fellow Peruvian "Amarilis", whose identity is also uncertain. Because she wrote under a pen