About The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

So begins American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. On this day in 1925, according to the Associated Press, "the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby was first published by Scribner's of New York." To read more about that novel, click here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald circa 1921 

"A Storm in April" by Richard Wilbur

Read the poem "A Storm in April" by the great American poet Richard Wilbur.

Watch a video of Richard Wilbur introducing and reading his poem "A Storm in April."

Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Richard Wilbur - Poetry readings: 'A Storm in April' (71/83)

Anonymous Japanese poem: "If only when one heard"

On my birthday this year I turned sixty-seven. I remember how I looked forward to birthdays when I was a child; how I counted the months, the weeks, the days, the hours until I was finally another year older. What the heck was I thinking? Here is an anonymous, untitled, twentieth-century Japanese poem about the coming of Old Age.

If only when one heard
That Old Age was coming,
One could bolt the door,
Answer "Not at home,"
And refuse to meet him!

Source of poem: Great Short Poems from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Dover Publications, 2011), edited by Dorothy Belle Pollack

"The Garden" by Belle F. Owens : Christ in Poetry

The final song in Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, is "John Nineteen: Forty-One." In the Bible, John 19:41-42 (Good News Translation) reads: "There was a garden in the place where Jesus had been put to death, and in it there was a new tomb where no one had ever been buried. Since it was the day before the Sabbath and because the tomb was close by, they placed Jesus' body there." Here is a poem by Belle F. Owens about resurrection, a subject that Jesus Christ Superstar does not deal with.


THE GARDEN

The garden now is sealed and dead,
But, lo! a crocus lifts its head;
This is the tomb of Love, we feel,
But here an iris breaks the seal.
This is not death but wonted birth,
But resurrection of the frost-bound earth;
The silver rain unseals the crust
And through the sod green spears will thrust
Returning spring, renew our faith,
For he is risen as he saith.


Source of poem: Christ in Poetry (1952), an anthology compiled and edited by Thomas Curtis Clark and Hazel Davis Clark

"Good Friday" by Christina G. Rossetti

Today is Good Friday, the Friday before Easter observed in churches as the anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ. Read the poem "Good Friday" by Christina G. Rossetti.

Christina G. Rossetti (1830-1894)

English poet