Keats Influence On The Great Gatsby

Literary Imitation is a concept prevalent throughout American literature, and extremely important in influencing authors and works regarded as extremely important in shaping writing unanimously agreed to be central to the core of important literature. In many cases, an author may choose their favorite author and try to emulate their style. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, had a favorite poet named John Keats, who is famously noted for writing about life with a nonpareil understanding of its pleasures. Fitzgerald admired Keats so much that there are several examples of “Fitzgerald editing Keats’s verse for his own aesthetic and interpretative reasons,” and repurposing them in his own stories (McGowan 9). Most notably, Fitzgerald titled one of his works Tender is the Night, a line directly out of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” However, as Dan McCall explains out in his essay, “Keat’s influence on the Great Gatsby should not be understood exclusively in terms of ‘literary imitation’”(McCall 522). Not only does Fitzgerald include very similar style of writing to his role model, but he also deliberately writes in a way that encapsulates the same emotions, evoking the same feelings Keats does in his poetry. Reading Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale" illuminates new meaning and comprehension on to Fitzgerald’s complex characters, especially the enigma of Gatsby who spends much of the book shrouded in mystery.

Scott Fitzgerald’s work is unmistakable in The Great Gatsby: several allusions are made to his poem Ode to the Nightingale, particularly regarding his illustrious, yet sometimes confusing character Jay