An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

-- John Keats, "To Autumn"

He's a big man, bearded, with a thick head of what one fellow poet calls "the best hair in American poetry." Born in 1939, Plumly has already lived nearly three times as long as the 25 years allotted to Keats.

The great lyric poet's early demise is part of his legend. When he expired in the arms of his friend Joseph Severn on Feb. 23, 1821 -- of tuberculosis, in Rome, to which he had traveled from England in a last-ditch attempt to improve his health -- he had barely five years' worth of poetry to his name. None of it, he believed, was good enough to prevent him from being forgotten.

He was wrong: His odes, in particular, are now among the most revered poems in the English language.

They weren't what sparked Plumly's interest, however.

"I knew the poems from the beginning of time," he says. But back in the 1960s and 1970s, moving from one temporary teaching job to another, he was focused on his own growth as a poet and more drawn to contemporary role models like Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin.

What changed?

"I met a lady," Plumly says, "and she started quoting Keats's letters to me."

He's talking about a younger poet named Deborah Digges, whom he encountered at a writers' conference in 1980, shortly after she'd been immersed in a graduate school course on Keats. "I just was on fire with him," Digges recalls. Soon Plumly was as well. They would wake each other at 3 in the morning to ask excitedly, "Did you read this passage?"

Eventually they got married. The marriage lasted seven years. Plumly's Keats obsession would prove far more durable.

"You can't read that life and not be compelled by it," he says. "It is the quality of the mind . . . and the wonderful vulnerability, which is so powerful, in that mind. And then you get to the poems and realize that the modern lyric as we understand it is created, by this young man, as a vehicle for a tragic vision."

In the early 1980s, Plumly wrote a poem that used an extended Keatsian moment to capture that life and vision.