In the same year he published his first Dutch poetry in the influential magazine De nieuwe gids (The New Guide). The journal, founded in 1885, was dominated at this period by the poet Willem Kloos (1859–1938), who used its pages to proclaim a radical aestheticism and advocate literature that was both non-sectarian and non-utilitarian. Poetry, Kloos famously asserted, was ‘the supremely individual expression of the supremely individual emotion’. Kloos was deeply impressed by Gorter’s début, Mei (May, 1889), an epic poem of some 4,000 lines, mostly in rhyming five-foot iambics (not coincidentally the metre of Keats’ ‘Endymion’), which soon became an iconic work of the so-called Movement of 1880. (Puzzlingly, only fragments of this seminal poem have so far been translated into English.)