An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

"Keats is in a hired carriage on his way from Naples to Rome. He has less than four months to live," Plumly wrote in a commentary on the poem. "Severn, his companion, thinking to make more room for his sick friend and tired of the rough ride, decides to walk. His painter's eye cannot help but be attracted to the color in the day -- mountains, the sea, the Italian sky, the fencerows of the vineyards, and, almost at their feet, blue and white and yellow flowers. . . .

"Severn can't keep his hands off the flowers. Nor does he know what to do with them once he's picked them. So he puts them, by the handful, in the small carriage with Keats. . . . By the time they reach the outskirts of Rome, Keats is witness to his own funeral."

Plumly called his poem "Posthumous Keats," echoing the phrase -- "a posthumous existence" -- that Keats himself used to describe the year and a half before he died, when he had stopped writing poetry and knew his fate. Before long, supported by his friend Daniel Halpern at Ecco Press, he launched a prose project of the same name, which was to focus on those final 18 months.

Plumly read everything, absorbed everything. He took himself off to London several times, holed up in the library at the Keats House museum, took the train to Winchester and walked the walk that led Keats to write "To Autumn," which many call his most perfectly realized poem. In Italy, he rented the apartment above the one in which Keats died, at the Spanish Steps. Twice he traced the route Keats and Severn took from Naples to Rome.

He knew he didn't want to commit a mere "act of scholarship." Enough biographers had already had their way with Keats. But as the years went by, he realized that he wasn't sure what kind of book he did want to write.

"I was writing it and discarding it again and again," he says.

At some point, he realized that he couldn't just write about that last year and a half: "I had to deal with what led up to it." Having no desire to write chronologically, he also needed a structure that would let him range through Keats's life, developing ideas and making connections: seven chapters, it turned out, each taking off from "images and themes that I thought were centers of gravity in his life."

One other thing: "Originally, I thought the book was a meditation on mortality," he says. "Then I realized that, no, it wasn't; it was a book about immortality."

This meant that his title could carry a double meaning.

No longer confined to the poet's last months, when he felt that he and his work would soon disappear together, Plumly's book could evoke, as well, the whole of Keats's brief, vivid existence -- and the unlikely chain of circumstances that kept his memory alive.

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow . . .