Aileen Ward, a scholar whose sympathetic, insightful biography of the Romantic poet John Keats won the National Book Award in the US in 1964, has died, aged 97.
Ward spent nine years researching John Keats: The Making of a Poet the first major account of his life since the publication of Amy Lowell's two-volume Keats in 1925. Her aim was twofold: to critically analyse Keats's poetry and, by reading his inner life, to explain what she called his "audacious act of self-creation."
As is happened, Ward prevailed over a mighty rival, the Harvard literary historian Walter Jackson Bate, who came out with his own Keats biography a few months after Ward’s, to admiring reviews and, eventually, a Pulitzer Prize. It, too, was in the running for the National Book Award – seemingly a David-and-Goliath contest in terms of the authors’ reputations – but the readability and psychological acumen of Ward’s version won the day.
"The question Bate leaves unexplained is what made the man become the poet," Philip C Rule wrote in Seeing Into the Life of Things: Essays on Religion and Literature (1997), edited by John L. Mahoney. "This is precisely the question that Aileen Ward sets out to answer."
Ward was doubly honoured when she won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in Britain for her biography. She was both the first American and the first woman to win that prize.
“As Allen Tate was the first to say, Keats is one of the real heroes of literature,” she said when receiving the National Book Award. “There is hardly another life we know of that speaks so eloquently of the daring, the energy and dedication that are required for great achievement as a writer.”
Aileen Coursen Ward was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, New Jersey. Her father, Waldron, was a lawyer; her mother was the former Aline Coursen.
After earning a BA in English from Smith College in 1940, she enrolled in Radcliffe, where she was awarded an MA in 1942 and a doctoral degree in 1953, with a dissertation on poetic metaphor.
Ward taught at Wellesley and Barnard before joining the Vassar English department in 1954. She later taught at Sarah Lawrence, Brandeis and New York University. She retired in 1990.
While at Wellesley, she struck up a friendship with Vladimir Nabokov, who was teaching Russian there. To cope with wartime gasoline rationing, the college organised car pools for commuters, and she and Nabokov shared a car that took them to their homes in Cambridge.
In an interview with Brian Boyd, the author of “Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,” Ward recalled that she and Nabokov would pass the time by making up parodies of poems by Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and other poets.
She leaves no immediate survivors. Her longtime partner, Nancy Cardozo, died in 2014.
– New York Times Service