“I met a lady,” Plumly says, “and she started quoting Keats’ letters to me.” She was a younger poet named Deborah Digges. They would wake each other at 3 a.m. 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, “And then the poems—you realise 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, Posthumous Keats, echoing the phrase “a posthumous existence”, which Keats himself used to describe the year-and-a-half before he died, when he had stopped writing poetry and knew his fate. It was then that Plumly launched a prose project of the same name, which was to focus on those final 18 months.

Plumly visited London, walked the walk that led Keats to write To Autumn. In Italy, he rented the apartment above the one in which Keats died. At some point, he realised that he couldn’t just write about that last year and a half: “I had to deal with what led up to it.” And so to the project that became the book.
“Originally, I thought the book was a meditation on mortality,” he says. “Then I realised that it was about immortality.” Plumly’s book evokes the whole of Keats’ brief, vivid existence. Plumly’s old friend David Baker says, “Keats is our preeminent poetic authority on the relationship of beauty and death, and that relationship has always been in Stan’s poems.”

Keats’ father died in a riding accident before Keats was 10; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. He nursed her, he would nurse his brother Tom, who was dying of the same disease. It is no coincidence, as Plumly says, that Keats writes his great odes in the year following Tom’s death, when the poet senses that “he has in fact begun to die”.
If you suggest to Plumly that Posthumous Keats might be seen as a life’s work, he balks. But it’s possible that the book Washington Post reviewer Ted Genoways called “a book worthy of Keats”, will be the lasting thing.
LATWP