The Poet under the Prose

The poetic imagery radiating thought out Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned rushes toward the goal of creating beauty in an American setting- with the American dialect. As his ever ideal Anthony expresses, the options for an American of leisure to form out of the industrial landscape a heightened expression of man is constantly crushed- practically anyway. The simple question that come to me in the face of brilliance was; is the process of seeking beauty ultimately empty, leaving nothing except the flawed turmoil of a human behind. The process of creating beauty is difficult, piecing, proportioning, relating, emphasising- everything. And in this what is left when the creation fades, is not beauty but the form and image of beauty. The beauty of the thing cannot attain everlasting permanence. Words fade. The psalms of the Bible cannot be translated in the same verve, whether they were expressively beautiful or not. The words can be translated with our poetry but it is not the same. The Greek temple can be copied, yes, and the form never has the original intonations. The beauty can be recreated, but never the original creation of the thing of beauty can not be repeated.

Thus, how can the American language become beautiful, if it does not have writers willing to take up the task, always content with copying the "English" beauty. This is what I respect about Fitzgerald, he took the plunge. In doing this the writer made himself accessible to the American people; brought small amounts of beauty before them. And he brought characters, wonderful characters. The scene at the end of Part II with "beauty" with Gloria leaving on the train and the notable three left in a mourning reminiscent of "Bye Bye Miss American Pie" is really fantastic... Ya that's enough.