Word: warded
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Registrar Sargent Kennedy '28 agreed that scheduling conflicts among large, populous courses is an urgent problem and one that "we are certainly going to try to work on." He called a departmental quota system "a definite start to ward solving the problem," but said "I'm enough of a realist to think you're still going to get logjams...
...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...
...more offensive than the looseness of her scholarship and style is her psychoanalytic approach to literature. In Miss Ward's hands, the dubious tool of Freudian literary analysis becomes simply gossip. "Just as he lost his fatrer," she writes, "at the age when he needed him most keenly, he found and then lost his mother again at the time of his sexual reawakening." (Keats was fifteen then: sexual reawakening?) Distasteful as that sort of thing is when it concerns Keats's personal life, it recovers at least to the level of patent silliness where literature is involved. "Though 'Calidore...
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...