Walter Jackson Bate
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Walter Jackson Bate (May 23, 1918 – July 26, 1999) was an American literary critic and biographer. He was born in Mankato, Minnesota.
He is known for two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, of John Keats and Samuel Johnson. Bate studied (under Douglas Bush) and later taught at Harvard University.
His critical work was very much of its time and was quickly rendered moot by the theoretical revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, though The Burden of the Past and the English Poet responds to and anticipates some aspects of the work of Harold Bloom. His biography of Keats, however, has enjoyed an extraordinary reputation both as a scholarly resource and as a work of literature. Jane Kenyon, one of many writers to be influenced by the book, paraphrases it in her poem "Reading Late of the Death of Keats":
- I tried to distract myself by reading
late, but the rhythmic whirr and puff
of the oxygen machine reached me
where I lay, in the room
that was mine in childhood.
- Clearly I had packed the wrong book
in my haste: Keats died, propped up
to get more air. Severn
straightened the body on the bed,
and cut three dampened curls
from Keats's head.
- A huge moth bumped against the screen,
tattering its wings. I turned
off the lamp and lay, all ears,
until it flew or fell away. . .
He retired from teaching at Harvard in 1986, and died at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
[edit] Major works
- The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955).
- From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-century England (1961).
- John Keats (1963).
- Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats (1965).
- Colerige (1968).
- The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970).
- Samuel Johnson (1977).
