John Gray (poet)

John Gray ( born March 2, 1866 in London, † June 14, 1934 in Edinburgh ) was a British author and Roman Catholic priest.

Biography

Gray was born the son of a carpenter in London's working class district of Bethnal Green and worked as a librarian at the Foreign Office. Around 1890, he aroused by his first poems in the style of the fin de siècle aestheticist attention in literary circles interested and closed, among other acquaintance with Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, who was for a time his lover. Grays first volume of poetry Silverpoints appeared in 1893, by Charles Ricketts designed bibliophile, in small numbers. Gray made ​​himself a name as a translator of French Symbolists such as Mallarmé, Verlaine, Laforgue and Rimbaud, whose works he first transferred partly into English. Gray was considered a model for the title character in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he himself, however, always denied.

The late 1890s Gray converted to Catholicism. He studied theology at the Catholic Scots College in Rome and was ordained a priest in 1901. He spent the rest of his life in Edinburgh, where he worked at the Church of St. Patrick, and as rector of St. Peter. Gray lived with the French writer Marc -André Raffalovich.

Gray wrote his poems in addition to the novel Park: A Fantastic Story. Many of his later works deal with Christian saints. He died in 1934 after a short illness.

Works (selection)

• Silverpoints, poems (1893 )
• Ad Matrem, poems (1904 )
• The Long Road, poems (1926 )
• Park: A Fantastic Story, novel