Walter Jackson Bate - Major works

Literary critic and educator, born in Mankato, Minnesota, USA. On the Harvard faculty (1946), he became a prominent spokesman for the humanistic literary tradition, resurrected the study of 18th-c English literature, and wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning literary biographies of John Keats (1963) and Samuel Johnson (1977).

He is known for two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, of John Keats and Samuel Johnson.

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.

He retired from teaching at Harvard in 1986, and died at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Major works

The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955).