An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

When Stanley Plumly was finally ready to write "Posthumous Keats," he sat down at his IBM Selectric III and just typed it out.

For 2 1/2 years.

"Out of my head, right out of my head. It was all there," the poet and University of Maryland professor says. "It was in the fingers."

And why not? Plumly's obsession with John Keats began almost three decades before his extended meditation on Keats's life, death and uncertain path to immortality was finally published this year.

His original publisher gave up on the project. His ex-wife made bets that he'd never finish.

He sometimes felt like Sisyphus, watching the damn rock roll endlessly back down the hill.

But there were other times, Plumly says, when communing with the author of "Ode to a Nightingale" made him feel "at least twice alive." He felt "lifted, elevated -- and what made me feel that was Keats. That I had met him. What he calls, in a letter, 'a greeting of the spirit.' "

Spirits connecting across the centuries: If you're looking for a definition of literary immortality, it's hard to do better than that. But Keats almost missed out on it, which is part of what "Posthumous Keats" is about.

"The immortal world is incredibly mortal," Plumly says. "It's an accident! It isn't guaranteed that any of us is going to be remembered as the emperor of ice cream."

At this, the mortal poet -- who has spent half his adult life remembering the immortal one -- starts to laugh.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too . . .