Imagery
The Great Gatsby
The book has innumerable beautiful images, using language to characterize big ideas
and to help us understand characters; to create contrasts and to develop settings. (The
book feels to me like a combination of written text and visual text, like the project you just completed).
Consider the following images. They are visually powerful; their ideas matter; some sound melodious
(regular rhythm and no harsh or awkward syllable groupings) and some don’t.
 what information is conveyed? i.e. the narrative choice
 what is suggestive about the word use? i.e. the stylistic quality of the phrasing
 what are the connotations of the image details (approximate associations or formally symbolic
ones)? i.e. the stylistic quality of the image itself
 do the sound qualities (rhythms, syllables) matter?
Task
Create a “found poem”. A found poem is one in which you use the phrasing from a text to build your
poem. In this case, I want you to draw your phrasing from images found in pages 1-30 to construct a
poem that has a ‘flavour” that will lend itself to one of our 3 critical approaches.
The images I chose for my found poem...
Chapter 1
i.
“..foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” (2).
ii.
“…conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes” (2).
iii.
“…the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face…then the glow faded,
each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk” (14).
Chapter 2
iv.
“This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and
grotesque gardens...”(23).
v.
“Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and
comes to rest and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades...”(23).
p.s.
Do the names themselves have any of the same nuances that the imagery does? Consider their
names carefully, and decide what, if anything, they tell us: Nick Carraway? Tom Buchanan? Daisy?
Jordan Baker?
My Marxist-tinged found poem
Although “conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes”,
“Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track,
Into “a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes” “[come] to rest” .
“[T]he ash-gray men swarm up” but even so
“[F]oul dust floated in the wake of [their] dreams”.