An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

-- "Ode to a Nightingale"

Ah, but what kept "Posthumous Keats" alive? Why did Plumly continue to plug away on a project that refused -- for decades -- to come together?

"Most people would have abandoned it after 10 years, or they'd have written it," says Halpern, who didn't end up publishing the book at Ecco. (Plumly took it to W.W. Norton, in the end.) "But he did finish it. He did a terrific job."

Plumly's old friend David Baker, who teaches at Denison University, remembers hearing a rumor in the late 1980s "that Stanley Plumly was working on a book about Keats." People would say, "Have you seen it?" Baker recalls, laughing, but no one ever had.

What does he think drew Plumly so powerfully to his subject?

"It's very complicated," Baker says. Part of it is the "absolute awe" many poets feel for Keats's odes, for his creation of "something so profoundly beautiful that we never saw before." Part of it has to do with the two poets' close involvement with nature. There's a technical bond as well, something about sheer dexterity with language: Plumly must think of Keats, Baker believes, as a kind of stylistic father or big brother.

Then there's the mortality thing.

Keats is our preeminent poetic authority on "the relationship of beauty and death," Baker says, "and that relationship . . . has been in Stan's poems from the very beginning." Plumly's father, about whom he writes a lot, died of a heart attack at 56, and Baker notes that his friend has lived through serious heart trouble himself.

Ask Plumly what's behind his long-lasting attraction to Keats and he calls it "very hard to pin down." Then he talks about "the quality of the life and the quality of the work coming together," and also "the quality of the death. Because he dies over a long period of time and he knows it, and how he deals with that is amazing, too."

Keats's family owned a stable, but his father died in a riding accident before Keats was 10; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. He nursed her, just as eight years later he would nurse his brother Tom, who was dying of the same disease. It is no coincidence, as Plumly's book makes clear, that Keats writes his great odes in the year following Tom's death, at a time when the poet senses that -- while not yet visibly sick -- "he has in fact begun to die."

"Everyone gets wounded," Plumly says. "What you do with it and how you deal with these vulnerabilities makes all the difference."

But here comes the strange part.