Posthumous Keats A Personal Biography

Posthumous Keats is the result of Stanley Plumly's twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romanticists. John Keats's famous epitaph--"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water"--helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before his time. Keats, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five, saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry, and therein, Plumly argues, lies his tragedy: Keats thought he had failed in his mission "to be among the English poets."

In this close narrative study, Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality--an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats, whose poetic influence remains immense. Incisive in its observations and beautifully written, Posthumous Keats is an ode to an unsuspecting young poet--a man who, against the odds of his culture and critics, managed to achieve the unthinkable: the elevation of the lyric poem to sublime and tragic status.

"...[F]or Keats, his had long been a hope at once firm and tentative: 'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.' For it is I think that gives the asseveration such grace and dignity, so that a small but not insignificant wrong is done when (on a couple of occasions in Posthumous Keats) his precisely guarded hope is indurated into 'his statement to his brother George, in 1818, that he would be among the English poets after his death,' within 'a future that meant to place him 'among the English poets.'" Christopher Ricks, New York Review of Books (read the entire )

A Los Angeles TimesFavorite Book and a Washington PostBest of 2008: 'A book worthy of Keats'"full of feeling and drama and those fleeting moments we call genius."Ted Genoways, Washington Post Book World

An acclaimed American poet reflects on the life and legacy of John Keats.

Stanley Plumly has written nine books of poetry. His many honors include the William Carlos Williams Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Plumly is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.