The enchanted terms in which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it. “It was an age of satire,” he wrote, and yet we suppose that the writer who both embodied the Jazz Age and identified satire as its essential feature never employed it himself. Fitzgerald’s sardonic humor and his disquiet—the sense that “life is essentially a cheat and its conditions those of defeat,” as he later wrote—give his best work moral realism and gravitas, grounding the flights of his prose.

a poem