Word: bates
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contrast to the accuracy and wisdom of Bate's book stands Aileen Ward's John Keats: The Making of a Poet. Miss Ward's book was published barely a week before Bate's and, surprisingly, neither author was aware of the other's project. Not so surprising actually, since one biography is a masterful, magnificent study, and the other is an over-written attempt at literary psychoanalysis...
...first problem, I think, is that Miss Ward is a woman. She insists on calling Keats a "lad," she has terrible chapter titles like "Soundings and Quicksands." Rather than pay attention to the sources, she habitually imagines what Keats "must have felt." Bate, when he has no evidence for someone's state of mind, says so; Miss Ward blends speculation with fact to suit herself...
...earliest poems) is a fantasy of rebirth, of emergence into a masculine world, not of mere retreat as was the 'Imitation of Spenser' (Keats's first poem), it shows Keats still closely tied to half remembered early experience, not yet ready for the full freedom of mature creation." Bate, on the other hand, treats it as a poem, not a sympton...
...Bate, in fact, deals with the same questions Keats did. The intellectual specialization Bate mentions in his Preface applies to critics as well as to artists, and Bate's problem is, how does scholarship use scholarship? Howard Mumford Jones, on his retirement, lay down an eloquent answer...
This is the character of Bate's work. In the past seventy-five or one hundred years, professional learning has gathered up and arranged the facts for much of the humane discipline. The scholar too often finds himself able only to rehash old stories or, like Miss Ward, to go dangerously far out on a logical limb; rarely can be relate his learning to the constant problems of man-kind. For all its erudition and its technicality, all its grace and intelligence, the quality most to be valued in John Keats is that as biography it can, in Johnson...