Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

Cramming meaning into a few words, what some poetry books call
"compression", does not begin when Hemingway meets a man-woman in
Europe and as a vision of an iceberg nmethod, but is an American
tradition that we can trace to our Puritan roots. It is a funny thing
to read Puritan Poets, Bradstreet for example, with people not so well
versed in this tradition. f Bradstreet is a puritan how come she
doesn't write in the plain style that the puritans advanced and
advocated with religious zeal? But she does. And Emily hiding in the
house, though a romantic,cpmpresses words as well. The romantics, like
Dickenson and Hawthorne, though they too semm verbose, i.e. Whitman,
and the Puritans, though they seem loaded up with allusions, are the
true founding fathers and mothers of the new-romantics like Pynchon.
The man who connects them all, of course, is Emerson; he who started
and led the parade. That Pynchon playfully pushes Wigglesworth, author
of our fist American epic, The Day of Doom, into his fist novel is
telling. Wigglesworth, popular and on the tongues of infants in
Puritan America, is an important root in our literary declaration of
independence, something that we have to wait for Emerson to lead, but
we should not so much contrast him with Blake's infants of Innocense,
as see the ironic words later put in the mouths of babes by romantics.
Got any gum, chum (GR. down in a hole somewhere).

When Bradstreet's House burns, she thinks it the day of doom, but, as
the chapter and verse audience, steeped in the allusions biblical
would know, and as the readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, where fire
and ice move through the town and whee the kids build there balck and
white, adrogynous smowman, would not, the twinkling of an eye, the
blasting of the trumpet, remains eyes wide shut and muted.

Compression is skill we can learn, but the kind that Keats has or
Fitzgerald or Pynchon or Heaney or Yeats....I think its the luke of
the Irish cowboy; a gift that poetic people are born with. It can't be
taught.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand