Another Failed Poet: The Lyrical Whimsy of Jack London

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"I'm a failed poet," William Faulkner confessed to Jean Stein in 1956, during a conversation subsequently published in the Paris Review . "Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry." Jack London made a similar confession forty-three years before that in his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn: "I had four preferences [when I decided] to embark on my career," he recalled, "first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible [and wrote] humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. . . . At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat." Read on...