In 1919, Scribner’s accepted Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, which appeared the following year. Just a century earlier, in 1819–20, John Keats wrote the great sequence of odes that contributed to giving him first place in Fitzgerald’s poetic pantheon. Fitzgerald quoted from, and alluded to, Keats many times in his work, the borrowing of the title Tender Is the Night from the “Ode to a Nightingale” being the best-known example. Jonathan Bate duly notes these debts in his new book Bright Star, Green Light, but his wider purpose is to “bring [Keats and Fitzgerald] back to life in the Plutarchian style.” Plutarch wrote parallel lives: but parallel lines, as we all know, can never meet, and nor do many of Bate’s arguments.

When Keats died at twenty-five, he left a body of poetry that included not only the Odes but “Isabella,” “The Eve of St Agnes,” “Lamia,” Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and sonnets such as “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” and “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art,” all of which can stand comparison with the best of their kind. His letters are among the greatest in the language, redolent of a captivating personality and developing profound ideas about poetry, Shakespeare, and the workings of the human mind. If Fitzgerald had died at twenty-five, we would have