An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

For what Keats was trying hardest to achieve, as he dealt with his particular vulnerabilities, had nothing to do with embedding a hard-earned tragic vision in short lyric poems of a kind and quality the world had never seen. At the time of his death, he still believed he had been destined to write long epic poems. And he thought he had failed for lack of time.

Posterity, initially, agreed with him. The legend grew that the harsh criticism to which his early work was subjected had literally killed "poor Keats." Less than 25 years after he died, Plumly notes, Keats's publisher "sold copyright to the poems and unpublished manuscripts for exactly 50 pounds" due to "a lack of readership."

So why do we even know about Keats today?

"The Pre-Raphaelites. They saved him," Plumly says, referring to the 19th-century English artistic movement that favored romantic narrative painting. "They saved him for the wrong reasons, for the wrong poems" -- for the attempted epics, in other words, now viewed as Keats's lesser work. "They absolutely resurrected him."

This allowed the right poems to become visible enough for later poets and scholars to pronounce their creator immortal. And, moving ahead, it allowed Plumly to think this once-"failed" poet worthy of a quarter-century's labor.

If you suggest to Plumly, even tentatively, that "Posthumous Keats" might be seen as a life's work, he balks. He has written a lot of fine poetry, after all. His collection "Old Heart" was a finalist for a National Book Award last year. He has new projects planned.

"He wants to be remembered for his poetry, not his prose," Halpern says, and he will be, at least "as much as anybody gets remembered for their poetry -- which is not many and not for long."

Maybe so.

But it seems just possible that the volume Plumly gave the subtitle "A Personal Biography," the one Washington Post reviewer Ted Genoways called "a book worthy of Keats -- full of feeling and drama and those fleeting moments we call genius," will be the lasting thing.

And should that prove true -- well, Plumly has already explained, in "Posthumous Keats," how these accidents can happen.

John Keats achieves his immortality "in a way wholly different than what he intends," Plumly writes. And that's "simply how life and art works."