Word: bate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bate'sKeats culminates twenty-five years of loving scholarship, beginning with his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. It represents a classic synthesis of the two major styles of modern biography. With few exceptions, scholarly biography in the twentieth century has been characterized either by massive detail (what Sinclair Lewis, for example, had for breakfast) or by brisk, selective interpretation (Andrew Turnbull's fine F. Scott Fitzgerald). In reconciling the two extremes, Professor Bate has not only produced a great biography, he has also--more importantly--provided a new definition, by example, of the profounder uses of scholarship...
Writers, however, have a larger interest in Keats. "It is a commonplace," Bate writes, that poetry and indeed all the arts have seemed to become increasingly specialized throughout the last two hundred and fifty years, and especially during the twentieth century. We face even more directly the problem that was widely discussed throughout the fifty years before Keats was born and also throughout his lifetime: where are the Homers and Shakespeares, the 'greater genres'--the epic and dramatic tragedy--or at least reasonable equivalents...
...problem Keats faced was, how to achieve originality in the face of tradition? How does literature use literature? And Keats, believes Bate, "was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to trancend...
...Bate does justice to both dramas--the life of Keats and the life of his mind. Using the most recent discoveries in the manuscripts of the "Keats Circle" as well as older criticism and interpretation, he succeeds in drawing remarkably close to the London Keats must have known in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By skillful, imaginative use of sources, he lifts the dullness from detail and adds a charm of his own: "On February 9, which was a fair warm day, [Keats] took a short walk in the garden, but he seems to have remained indoors...
...Finally, Bate writes beautifully, and thereby reduces the scope and diversity of his subject to the complicated clarity of a fine intelligence. His style, in fact, suggests nothing so much as that of George Eliot, wise and quietly affectionate...