The Self-Same Song that Found a Path

F SCOTT FITZGERALD S favorite author was John Keats. Of Ode on a Grecian Urn Fitzgerald wrote, suppose I've read it a hundred times. About tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught chime in it and exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with 'Nightingale' which I can never read without tears in my eyes. And Eve of St. Agnes has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. 1 Even without such an explicit statement from Fitzgerald, we might assume Keats meant something like that to him. In This Side of Paradise (II, ii), Amory Blaine declaims the 'Ode to a Nightingale' to bushes and then talks about poetry, distinguishing between Keats and himself on what each finds primarily beautiful. In opening chapter of The Great Gatsby is a nightingale singing in Buchanan yard, very romantic outdoors. Several scenes in Gatsby take place in starlit nights; it is that we so often see title figure in his most characteristic pose, and it is pose of speaker in Keats lyric: man under wandering stars who wants to comprehend and join his life to a precious being of eternal beauty. Fitzgerald quite consciously draws upon Keats's language; near end of fifth chapter, there was no light save what gleaming floor bounced in from hall is clearly an echo of Keats's phrase in Nightingale: there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with breezes blown. . And another line from that poem will provide title for Fitzgerald's most ambitious work, Tender Is Night. Keats's influence on The Great Gatsby should not be under

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• A Love-Hate Relationship”

  Laura Key, Laura E B Key•English Studies•2014

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