How Keats lives on
How Keats lives on His radical depictions of desire and oblivion changed the course of English poetry – and, 200 years after his death, they disarm us still. As Jonathan Bate observes, the American critic Edmund Wilson “never allowed his friendship to dull his critical intelligence”. He had been close to F Scott Fitzgerald as a student, but, writing in 1924 about Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, he was unforgiving towards what he saw as its central weaknesses – a lack of energy and coherence, which he attributed to the intertwining malign influences of Compton Mac...