Bibliography
Gray's first notable publication was a collection of verse called Silverpoints (1893), consisting of sixteen original poems and thirteen translations from Verlaine (7), Mallarmé (1), Rimbaud (2), and Baudelaire (3). In his review of it Richard Le Gallienne distinguished it from the output of many of the 'decadent' poets in its inability to accomplish "that gloating abstraction from the larger life of humanity that marks the decadent". Gray's second volume, Spiritual Poems, chiefly done out of several languages (1896), defined his developing identity as a Catholic aesthete. It contained eleven original poems and twenty-nine translations from Jacopone da Todi, Prudentius, Verlaine, Angelus Silesius, Notker Balbulus, St John of the Cross, and other poets both Catholic and Protestant. Gray's later works were mainly devotional and often dealt with various Christian saints. The Long Road (1926) contained his best-known poem, "The Flying Fish", an allegory which had first appeared in The Dial in 1896. Gray produced one novel, Park: A Fantastic Story (1932), a surreal futuristic allegory about Fr Mungo Park, a priest who, in a dream, wakes up in a Britain which has become a post-industrial paradise inhabited by black people who are all Catholics, with the degenerate descendants of the white population living below ground like rats. The novel is characterised by a vein of dry humour, as when a Dominican prior wonders if Park could have met Aquinas. Gray's collected poems, with extensive notes, were printed in a 1988 volume edited by English professor and 1890s expert Ian Fletcher. His definitive biography was published in 1991 by Jerusha Hull McCormack, who also edited a selection of his prose works. McCormack published a fictionalized version of his life in 2000, under the title of "The Man Who Was Dorian Gray".
- Silverpoints (1893). Poems
- The Blue Calendar (1895–1897). Poems
- Spiritual Poems, chiefly done out of several languages (1896)
- Ad Matrem: Fourteen Scenes in the Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1903). Poems
- Vivis (1922). Poems
- The Long Road (1926). Poems
- Poems (1931)
- Park: A Fantastic Story (1932). Manchester: Carcanet, 1985. ISBN 0-85635-538-0
- The Poems of John Gray (edited by Ian Fletcher). Greensboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 1988. ISBN 0-944318-00-2
- The Selected Prose of John Gray (edited by Jerusha Hull McCormack). Greenboro, North Carolina: ELT Press, 1992. ISBN 0-944318-06-1
