The odd couple: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

On a shard of paper, some time in the bleak mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated a favourite line from one of his favourite poets, John Keats, in a short verse of his own:

Don’t you worry I surrenderDays are long and life’s a benderStill I know thatTender is the Night

Keats was a Romantic, perhaps the Romantic, with his lyric gift and tragically brief life. Fitzgerald loved the Romantic poets, and romance in the lower case, but was at the heart’s core a modernist, far more egoist than romantic, and quite hard-boiled. The little quatrain above is rather like T.S. Eliot’s ‘jug jug’ in The Waste Land — homage of a sort, but also showing ironic distance, and no intention of writing like Keats. Indeed, it’s all about his own novel in the last line, with ‘Night’ capitalised; the moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Jonathan Bate, in Bright Star, Green Light, speculates on the convergence of the twain.