Aileen Ward

Aileen Ward (1 April 1919 – 31 May 2016), was an American professor of English literature who won both a National Book Award and a Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for her book "John Keats: The Making of a Poet".

Early life and education Aileen Coursen Ward was born on April 1, 1919, in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Summit, N.J. Her father, Waldron, was a lawyer; her mother was the former Aline Coursen.

After earning a B.A. in English from Smith College in 1940, she enrolled in Radcliffe College, where she was awarded her M.A. in 1942 and a doctorate in 1953. Her dissertation was on poetic metaphor. and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize of 1963.

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966.

Selected works Ward, Aileen. John Keats: The Making of a Poet. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Ward, Aileen. The Unfurling of Entity: Metaphor in Poetic Theory. New York: Garland Pub, 1987. De, Quincey T, and Aileen Ward. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Other Writings ... Edited and with a Foreword by Aileen Ward. New American Library; New York & Toronto; New English Library: London, 1966. Keats, John, Aileen Ward, and David Gentleman. The Poems of John Keats. New York: Heritage Press, 1966. Ward, Aileen. "Canterbury Revisited: The Blake-Cromek Controversy." Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 22 (1988). Ward, Aileen. "The forging of Orc: Blake and the idea of revolution." TriQuarterly 23 (1972): 204.

Personal life Ward died on May 31, 2016. At the time she was still working on a biography of William Blake, as she had been for nearly 50 years.