An Ode to John Keats's Immortality

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

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 . . .

-- 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.

"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 . . .

-- "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.

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."