Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

If I accept these classifications (it doesn't help that the binary,
though obvious enough in the division you make, is somehow rejected)
and set Donne and Keats in different poetic classes, though members of
the English tradition,  based on the pathetic fallacy, that is  Donne,
sometimes called a metaphysical poet, and Eliot & Co., somehow fits on
one side, while Wordsworth & Blake, and Frost &Co. on the other, I
still cannot make the great leap into prose fiction, a jump that would
lump Fitzgerald with Keats and Pynchon and Bath with Eliot. All of
these authors had this much in common: they participated in
self-conscious artistic revolutions that strove to break with old
artistic models by inventing new forms. But what they were breaking
with invloved a vision and often a re-vision of the history of forms
that was formulated by their own priorities and concerns, often what
they considered the crisis that, while somehow linked with events in
reality, were often anxieties about the artists they had to, once
conscious of their influence, self-consciously, break with.

And, this gets me thinking about one of the essential themes of
Romantics, that is, the loss of youth and innocence, and how this
distinguishes them from the Victorians, who are, self-consciously
anxios, not only about the modern fragmentations and alienations and
beaches dovered with rocks grinding nihilisitcally, but are Nostalgic.
In your classification Pynchon is not a Romantic, but a Nostalgic
Victorian postmodernist. That is, he goes with Eliot. But Pynchon is
not nostalgic. He is a Romantic. And so, the pathetic fallacy need not
make metaphysical complexity of trees. What falls in the woods when
Man flies toward Grace matters not at all, but that Prairie sees the
Trees for the Woods.