America the Beautiful

'The Great Gatsby' as Romantic Poetry

Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby, 1974, via Getty Images

One hundred years ago this Thursday, The Great Gatsby was first published. It has endured like few novels in modern history and remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read. The mythos of the novel — and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic life — looms so large still that it’s easy to forget the literature itself. If there is a Great American Novel, it is The Great Gatsby. To celebrate the centennial of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, we have commissioned three remarkable pieces of criticism. Consider this The Metropolitan Review’s Gatsby Week. First up is John Pistelli to meditate on how unlikely Fitzgerald’s genius was — and what it meant for the doomed author to write The Great Gatsby as something akin to Romantic poetry.

—The Editors

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The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
—Walt Whitman (1855)

Perhaps what this country needs is a great poem.
—Herbert Hoover (1932)

Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald write one great book?

We could ask this question in two different ways. First, it might be remarkable that he was able to write any masterpieces at all, even if only one. A chronicler of his age’s excesses in gossipy romans à clef, a middling-to-poor student of elite institutions, a status-conscious social climber from a downwardly mobile Midwestern family, an Irish Catholic in a still-WASP-dominated America, and, eventually, a debilitated alcoholic in a failing marriage marked by intense mental instability — even allowing for the well-attested turbulence of the modern artist, the person described by this list of characteristics is not an obvious candidate for the author of the Great American Novel. Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway were also unstable, alcoholic, or both, but they wrote from experiences more intense, from settings more extraordinary, and from erudition more solid than anything offered by Fitzgerald’s gentlemanly-mediocre Princeton or gin-soaked Jazz Age New York. Fitzgerald himself feared that in having been drafted too late to see combat in the Great War, he had missed his opportunity not only for heroism but for crucial literary material. How did a person so apparently unserious write The Great Gatsby, which is, on the centenary of its publication, the only 20th-century American novel every literate American has read? The question could be asked the other way, too, though: why did an author with such a rich literary gift only write one great book, even allowing for his alcoholism, his bad marriage, his decadent social scene, and all the rest of it?

Either way we pose the question, the answer is the same, the one Fitzgerald himself gave when he lamented to his daughter, Scottie, of his single success and his multiple failures in a letter of 1940:

What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now that I’d never relaxed or looked back — but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line — from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty — without this I am nothing.”

What is the nature of this one book in which he’d found his duty? A contrast with what preceded it will help to clarify the achievement of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald wrote his debut, This Side of Paradise, in a feverish rush, first to leave a literary monument in case he died in a trench in Europe and then to make enough money to marry the Southern belle Zelda Sayre, whom he’d begun courting when his army unit was stationed near her native Montgomery, Alabama. The novel became an immediate sensation for its portrait of restive and elite youth, acclaimed by H. L. Mencken, among the most influential critics of the day, as the best American novel of recent years (for comparison, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was published the same year). Originally titled The Romantic Egotist, this bildungsroman narrates in a witheringly ironic third-person voice the early life and adventures of the Fitzgerald-like hero Amory Blaine as he journeys from the Midwest to Princeton, reads his way through the great books, tries on the fashionable ideologies of the period (Nietzscheanism, Tolstoyism, socialism, Catholicism), and attempts to seduce women above him in the social hierarchy. The Fitzgerald of this first novel was essentially a wit and an ironist with a style partly modeled on British precursors name-dropped in the text like Wilde, Shaw, Wells, and Chesterton. (Demonstrating the influence of the British dramatists, the text occasionally even transitions from a narrative to a play script with dialogue and stage directions.) Fitzgerald tends to use the novel’s often ornately verbose style and its emotional remove from the action to puncture the romantic delusions of the almost titular egotist by abrading them against cruel reality, as at the novel’s inconclusive conclusion:

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.

Fitzgerald quickly followed up the success of This Side of Paradise with The Beautiful and Damned in 1922 — its memorable title could be affixed not only to this novel but to his whole oeuvre — another ironic demolition of a romantically yearning hero. This time the Fitzgerald-like protagonist is Anthony Patch, a would-be heir to an Eastern fortune, who ruins himself by marrying the Zelda-like gorgeous nihilist Gloria Gilbert and losing himself with her in a folie à deux of alcoholic dissipation in a post-Christian America that has lost its ethical moorings. Written in a less facetious style than its precocious precursor, The Beautiful and Damned draws on naturalist models like Hardy and Dreiser to dramatize the fated destruction of delusive hedonists by their corrupt milieu. Again, Fitzgerald takes satiric aim at his hero’s desire for beauty, intensity, pleasure, and richness of experience. Insofar as Anthony spends too much of the novel in a drunken stupor to really count as its hero, Gloria emerges as this novel’s romantic egotist, whose love of beauty requires the narrator and the narrative’s severe discipline:

In the end then, her beauty was all that never failed her. She had never seen beauty like her own. What it meant ethically or aesthetically faded before the gorgeous concreteness of her pink-and-white feet, the clean perfectness of her body, and the baby mouth that was like the material symbol of a kiss.

Fitzgerald’s first two novels, then, are realist chronicles doubling as a moralist’s screed against social decay, even though their large initial audiences were predictably more attracted by the decadent pleasures portrayed than by the lesson the author intended.

To read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned today is to be reminded that the American canon was not yet fixed in the early 20th century. For American writers who came of age in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, like Wharton, Mencken, and Fitzgerald, the standard of fiction remained British and French realism with its anti-Romantic bias, while 19th-century American Romantic literature was, as Mencken himself complained in his essays and reviews, the work of genteel and sheltered Boston Brahmins like Emerson and Hawthorne or else weird mystics speaking a private idiom like Poe and Whitman, not writers willing and able to respond to the social scene. Only the robustly comic and gritty realism of Mark Twain, said Mencken, could compare with the work of British and European masters. Wharton, meanwhile, in her 1925 treatise The Writing of Fiction, counseled the budding writer that the modern novel was essentially a fusion of French psychological analysis with English social comedy; among American precursors, she lauded only her friend Henry James (she dismissed Poe and Hawthorne as “belong[ing] to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition”). On Mencken’s and Wharton’s theories, fiction should be realistic, not the symbolic and prose-poetic romance favored by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. By this standard, great American fiction began as late as the 1880s with the divergent realisms, plebeian and patrician respectively, of Twain and James. In this atmosphere, we can understand why the young Fitzgerald subjected the romantic yearning (and Romantic visionary drive) of his first two protagonists to a scornful irony — really more of a mannered and facile sarcasm — derived from British and French realists.

The supposed commitment of the American novelist to writing symbol-laden Romantic and tragic individualist allegories that share more in common with the sublimities of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Russian masters than with the more mundane and ironical socio-psychological realist fictions of England and France — this, which educated readers now tend to take for granted, was an idea developed by D. H. Lawrence, Charles Olson, and other modernist-era critics attempting to resurrect the then-moribund reputation of Herman Melville. This view was then institutionalized in the academy after World War II by scholars who wanted to give the world’s newly triumphant liberal empire a fit canon of epics, tragedies, and romances comparable to old Europe’s but compatible with democracy, a canon they found in the work not only of Melville, but also of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, and other authors of what came to be called the American Renaissance of the 1830s through the 1860s. Moby-Dick went from a forgotten adventure novel botched by its author’s unfortunate taste for metaphysics to the center of the American canon as our continent’s prose epic.

But Fitzgerald, a friend of Mencken’s and an admirer of Wharton’s, almost certainly never read Moby-Dick and could not have drawn on it as the inspiration for his novel in which a tragic hero’s doomed longing for transcendence (whether Ahab’s or Gatsby’s), heightened by its association with a series of open-ended and mysterious symbols (Melville’s white whale and gold doubloon and harpoon baptized in the name of the devil and Fitzgerald’s green light and gray ash heaps and billboard signifying the absence of God), possesses a tragic dignity rather than exemplifying a bathetic delusion to be held up for mockery by the satirist. And yet Fitzgerald achieves just this tragic and symbolically resonant dignity in The Great Gatsby alone. The Great Gatsby alone, therefore, and not its precursors, is heralded as an achievement on the level of Melville’s.

If Fitzgerald could not have taken the essentially symbolic Romantic fictions of Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne as his model in drafting his own lyric novel, then where did he get the idea? He had precursors in the art of the novel, of course, those who privileged perfection of form over breadth of content: Flaubert, James, Conrad, Cather. But in his “Introduction” to The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, subtly contesting the idea of Fitzgerald the social realist, directs us away from prose fiction:

It was not his dream to be a poet, yet that is how he started and in some ways he remained a poet primarily. He said of himself, “The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic type, which mine was in large part.” His favorite author was Keats, not Turgeniev (sic) or Flaubert. “I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times,” he said about the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with the ‘Nightingale,’ which I can never read without tears in my eyes; likewise ‘The Pot of Basil,’ with its great stanzas about the two brothers . . . . Knowing these things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read.” When his daughter was learning to be a writer he advised her to read Keats and Browning and try her hand at a sonnet in iambic pentameter. He added, “The only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.”

Here is the insight animating The Great Gatsby and absent, except intermittently, from This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned: write fiction as if it were poetry. Not just any poetry either, but the Romantic poetry of John Keats: sensuous, pagan, humanistic, musical, open-endedly symbolic, and free of moralizing judgments against human desire or its beautiful objects.

One of Fitzgerald’s stories, “Absolution,” published in 1924, was originally intended as the prologue to Gatsby and contains its Keatsian vision in miniature. The boy hero, Rudolph Miller, a prototype of the novel’s eponymous tragic hero, longs to escape the stifling confinement of his small Minnesota town. When his pious father sends him to confess his sins to the local Catholic priest, however, he finds that the priest is losing his mind to the same desire for escape and keeps repeating to the boy, as if visions of Jazz Age New York were dancing in his deluded eyes, “When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering.” Rudolph, though frightened by the priest’s instability, nonetheless takes it as a good sign: “But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.”

Keats, who wrote in one letter that the Puritan poet Milton’s vision of heaven would be hell to him, and in another that he would not endure poetry that tries to convince its reader of some dogmatic conclusion, could not have put it better. The crowning irony, dropped into the middle of the story, however, is that even Rudolph’s brutal and unimaginative father, in his desire to emulate local railroad executive and millionaire James J. Hill, also longs to have an essentially Keatsian relation to reality, one marked by a Romantic responsiveness to beauty and potential: “Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient — the sense of things, the feel of things, the hint of rain in the wind on the cheek.”

In this story, and in the novel it was meant to preface, Fitzgerald’s several apparent disqualifications for novelistic greatness mysteriously recombine into advantages: the obscure Midwestern origin becomes an incitement to epic desire; the Catholicism yields a warm appreciation for worldly beauty unknown to the American Puritan; and the attraction to revelry and spectacle becomes not a cause for lament but a rebuke to a world whose horizons are too narrow. Fitzgerald’s surprising tribute to the railroad executive Hill as an incipient artist able to intuit new possibilities even puts in question the platitude that Fitzgerald simply rejects the materialism and capitalism whose excesses he’d lived. The first two novels may clearly satirize an emergent consumer culture, but The Great Gatsby, like its rejected prelude “Absolution,” finds even in commerce and commodities the occasion for Keatsian romance; as many scholars have noted, one of the novel’s most celebrated scenes, when Daisy weeps over Gatsby’s abundance of flung shirts, derives from a similarly lush passage in Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

The Great Gatsby, unlike Fitzgerald’s first two novels, is as carefully and closely composed as a lyric poem. This time, Fitzgerald wrote slowly, with painstaking attention to each word, and the text is accordingly about a third the length of its rapidly written semi-potboiler precursors. Like a lyric poem — like his beloved Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — The Great Gatsby is narrated by a sensitive speaker circling a magnetic and mysterious object, in this case Gatsby’s (corruptly) self-made prominence and doomed attempt to win Daisy from her cruel husband Tom, a situation radiant with both ecstatic desire and grisly violence, frozen in a frieze of evocative language and elusive symbols the meaning of which the narrator finally leaves for us to decide.

Granted, the moralist in Fitzgerald remains active in the novel with narrator Nick Carraway’s famous final censure of Tom and Daisy as “careless people.” The disappointed male lover’s wounded propensity to make women’s immoderate and shallow desire symbolic of civilization’s whole decay, as in The Beautiful and Damned, recurs in the gruesome fate the narrative deals out to Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson in the culminating car accident — “her left breast was swinging loose like a flap” — which is just the obverse of the conclusion’s equally and oppositely unreal idealization of “the fresh green breast of the new world.”

But whereas the earlier novels, especially the New York-set The Beautiful and Damned, stereotypes the heterogeneous modern world’s diverse inhabitants with invidious and at times hateful portraits of Jewish-, Italian-, African-, and Asian-Americans — and therefore, incidentally, bely the still somehow fashionable idea that social novels automatically possess a humanistic social conscience — the observant eye of Nick Carraway understands the porousness of modern cultures, races, religions, and selves to be the precondition for Gatsby’s own rise:

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all . . . ”

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

As for capitalism, one of Gatsby and Nick’s last conversations about Daisy, circling the mystery of her voice that has haunted the narrator from its beginning, comes to the conclusion that her aesthetic and erotic appeal, like that of the novel’s own style, resembles currency.

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of — ” I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it . . . . High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl . . . .

Her voice is the form of value itself rather than any particular value’s content; similarly, Fitzgerald’s finest artistry can lend beauty to any subject matter as the requisite amount of money can purchase any object. Ironically, this value elevates the novel over one written just to make money alone, and, predictably, it fared far worse in the marketplace than This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. His first novel, for example, sold almost 50,000 copies, while his third sold fewer than 20,000.

With his fourth and final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald attempted to recapture something of Gatsby’s magic. This novel — note its Keatsian title, a phrase from “Ode to a Nightingale” — is a more mature but equally dispiriting reprise of The Beautiful and Damned. Over a decade in the making, it is Fitzgerald’s over rather than underdone recitation of the Zelda catastrophe, this time in retrospect rather than anticipation. Its hero, Dick Diver, is an unconvincing psychoanalyst who destroys himself by falling for a schizophrenic patient from a wealthy and sexually abusive home; the novel narrates, in third-person tones intermittently lyrical and lugubrious, the decay of their marriage in an overly long travelogue of European dissipation. Apparently missing the novel’s irony toward its protagonists, critics rejected Tender Is the Night when it was published in 1934 as a privileged relic of the Jazz Age out of place in the Great Depression and its literary vogue for proletarian literature. Ironically, Fitzgerald had by this time converted the moralism of his first two novels into a more well-developed political commitment; he recommended in his Depression-era letters to his daughter that she read Das Kapital and associate with leftists at college. Tender Is the Night may be Fitzgerald’s second-best novel, but it lacks the sleek grandeur of its precursor. Fitzgerald evidently excelled at the art of the novel-poem when writing in the first person and keeping the narrative brief. Despite its aesthetic triumph, though, the publication of The Great Gatsby began Fitzgerald on his slow slide into the obscurity in which he died at the age of 44 in 1940, almost a decade before his reputation, like Melville’s before it, would be revived by the postwar generation.

The Great Gatsby’s formal value as a work of supreme beauty over and above its content — a sleek, slim volume almost the length of a poetry collection, rife with pregnant phrases and tantalizing symbols — has secured its place as the schoolbook par excellence of the American canon. In our decade and a half of social media controversies and populist revolts, the novel has been targeted both by those on the left who feel its latter-day Romanticism perpetuates without sufficient censure the sins of racism, sexism, and classicism and those on the right who judge its aesthetics an imposition of elitist liberal schoolteachers on students (especially boys) who require sterner stuff. But the novel’s status is worth defending on its centenary because a comparison with Fitzgerald’s other books reveals the limitations of a literature devoted to overt moral virtue or explicit social critique. In his third novel, and in his third novel alone, Fitzgerald finds an ambiguous beauty even in the American situations where its author in his younger and shallower years had seen only ugly occasions for smug satire. And The Great Gatsby endures because of this beauty.

John Pistelli is the author of the novel Major Arcana (Belt Publishing 2025) and of the bestselling Substack newsletter

Grand Hotel Abyss

. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.