SOURCE: "Early Masks and Models" in John Gay, Twayne Publishers; Inc., 1965, pp. 17-40.

In the following excerpt, Spacks examines Gay's earliest poetry, demonstrating how the poet developed both his voice and his major artistic concerns. Although his early work is uneven, Spacks argues, it prefigures his more successful efforts at marrying the pastoral form with a more sophisticated tone, and adapting traditional genres to new uses.

Not until 1713, when he was twenty-eight years old, did John Gay begin to discover models which made extended poetic expression possible for him. He then described himself, in the first version of Rural Sports, as having "courted Bus'ness with successless Pain,/And in Attendance wasted Years in vain." For about eleven years he had struggled to make his way in London, having come from the provinces (Barnstaple, in Devon) as an apprentice to a silk mercer. When, around 1708, he became secretary to...