Fitzgerald is a Poet

This is a valley of ashes

 — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges

and hills and grotesque gardens;

 where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke

and, finally, with a transcendent effort,

of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

 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
and stir up an impenetrable cloud,
 which screens their obscure operations from your sight. (Fitzgerald 27)