BRIGHT STAR, GREEN LIGHT

For this unusual literary study, Sir Jonathan Bate, expert on Shakespeare and much else, takes the star-crossed figures of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, separated by a century, and gives them a double biography in the tradition of the classical biographer Plutarch, using each one's life story to draw out illuminating similarities and differences. Both writers cherished an unconsummated passion for an unattainable woman, in Keats's case for his neighbour Fanny Brawne, for whom he wrote the celebrated sonnet "Bright star!". Poems such as "St Agnes' Eve" describe lovers who are divided by circumstance, a theme Keats shares with Scott Fitzgerald. For Fitzgerald the unattainable woman was Ginevra King, whom he met when he was 18 and a student at Princeton. In spite of expressions of intense devotion, Ginevra belonged to a different class and six months after breaking with Fitzgerald she married a wealthy businessman. In an early short story the student Horace Tarbox is seduced from his studies by the ethereal chorus girl Marcia Meadows, and Ginevra was also immortalised as the unattainable Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald revered Keats and his novel Tender is the Night takes its title from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, while Keats's own inspiration was Shakespearean, as can be seen in early poems such as Endymion. When Keats left school he was apprenticed to a surgeon and in spite of enjoying some success never wavered in his vocation: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my death," as he memorably wrote. When Keats nursed his brother Tom who died of TB he had a suspicion that he might follow, and his journey to Rome with Joseph Severn was made in the knowledge that he was unlikely to return. Bate's analysis of both writers' work is challenging and perceptive, the biographical detail fully integrated. 415pp, illustrations.