Word: bating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...