J. L. Gordon's Early Stories and Their Role in His Poetic World

The present article investigates the reasons for J. L. Gordon's repeated assays into short prose, which lacked both the brilliance of past works and the impressive spaciousness of the modern novel. What was it that drove Gordon, a champion of poetry and an excellent practitioner thereof, to go back constantly to writing short fiction which was usually greeted with considerable reservation?

In what follows I shall claim that short fiction served Gordon as a field of experiment and practice, something which its formal and thematic freedom enabled, and even encouraged. An examination of the interrelation between his early story "The End of Happiness Is Sadness" and his lengthy poems about the present reveals that the former served as a kind of poetic "exercise," a means of experimenting with important features which would later appear in his mature poetry.

Consequently we may surmise that the supposedly great distance between Gordon's prose and poetry was in fact bridged by artistic principles derived from his experience in writing prose and then applied with great success in his poetry.