Letters

Poetic Licenses

In two of her recent Poet's Choice columns, Mary Karr makes assertions that cannot go unchallenged. In the June 8 issue of Book World, she states that "William Matthews beat brain cancer" before submitting to a heart attack in 1997. It was Matthews's wife, Patricia, who beat brain cancer. Two of Matthews's poems -- "Cancer Talk" ( Time & Money, 1995) and "Dire Cure" ( After All, 1998) -- identify and ultimately celebrate her survival. If Karr had consulted Search Party: Collected Poems (2004), for which Matthews was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, she might have noticed the connection between these two poems.

In the June 22 Book World, Karr comments that John Keats's great and famous late fragment known as "This Living Hand" is "an unfinished poem written when Keats's putative fiancée had dumped him once and for all." Fanny Brawne never for a day "dumped" Keats, either "once" or "for all." On the contrary, every syllable of evidence in both Keats's letters and the chronology of the many biographies makes clear that it is Keats himself who is the nervous doubter regarding their relationship -- he does not want Fanny tied to a dying man. As for the poem: It is written in the margin of an equally unfinished play Keats was working on near the end of his career. All the scholarship agrees that it may or may not be Keats's "living hand" or may or may not be the hand of a character in the play. Karr reduces this beautiful and powerful piece of a poem to a sentimental gesture of unrequited love.

-- STANLEY PLUMLY

Kentlands, Md.

Mary Karr replies:

I appreciate Stanley Plumly's correction about William Matthews, whom I met shortly before his death. I congratulated him on beating cancer (a mistake based on the poems for his wife). He said, "It was a tough go." If I hadn't canceled our dinner that night, I suppose he'd have clarified. Of such anecdotes, history is miswritten. Mea culpa.

As for the Keats correction, who did what to whom and when is open to interpretation. The two seminal biographies (by Robert Gittings and Walter Jackson Bate) disagree, and Keats's letters can be read both ways. About the "This Living Hand" fragment, Gittings says, "Though it never can be said when these lines were written, their tone is like his letters to Fanny Brawne." Keats wrote anxiously to her, sometimes daily: "Do not write unless you can do it with crystal conscience." This strikes me as a man defending his own affection rather than a guy on the run. Gittings claims, "[Keats] believed the conflicts of his love for Fanny would make him fatally ill again." Bate says that the fragment "used to be thought of as something addressed to Fanny Brawne." Bate also thinks Keats is writing about poetry in a passage Gittings believes addresses Brawne. Keats's own letters further argue for the unrequited love interpretation: "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible." And "the persuasion that I will see her no more will kill me."

I also take issue with Plumly's calling my interpretation of Keats's poem "sentimental," a phrase frequently used to dismiss powerful emotion in poems. If grief for lost love isn't a worthy subject, what is? That said, I look forward to reading Plumly's new Posthumous Keats, which I bought last week.

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