Customer Reviews

Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography

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Stanley Plumly finds Keats companionable -- and so do I. Plumly is a distunguished poet, yet his interest here is less in the poetry than in the poet. The story of the poet is sad and heroic, courageous and pitiable, and Plumly touches all these themes with generosity and compassion as well as a hard critical eye. Plumly is also interested in what might be called the myth of Keats - how his story and even his appearance have been burnished and reworked by his friends and the generations that follow. It takes a remarkable youth to have friends like Keats had, and Plumly has earned his place in the Keats Circle.

A few of Plumly's interests here threaten to become obsessive - the need to count the days til Keats's death appears throughout, whereas it would need be a source of profitable speculation only once. That Keats lived in the shadow of death is true enough, but the truth becomes diminished when it is mentioned so often. Still, any lover of Keats will embrace this work and acknowledge that it holds a unique place on the very long shelf of Keatsiana.

It's fitting and satisfying that it's two poets who have brought John Keats and his immediate world to vivid life. Way back in 1925, Amy Lowell gave us the first well-researched biography of Keats that is still a relevant and great read today. And now poet Stanley Plumly has given us a profound, demythologizing study of Keats's last 18 months and the reactions of his family and friends to his death.

Plumly's volume is an obvious work of love. He writes a straightforward history of Keats's last months, and then muses over the details from different perspectives. He turns a forensic as well as a philosophical eye on the motives and actions of Keats's inner circle of friends, spending considerable time ruminating on the characters and principles of Charles Brown, William Haslam, George Keats, and - of course - Joseph Severn. We see Keats's last days not just as they probably were, but as they must have been. And we see John Keats himself: fragile and anguished, full of vigor, innocence, trustworthiness, incredible talent, and deep, abiding love for Fanny Brawne and life itself.

Plumly's most remarkable accomplishment is his interweaving much of Keats's great odes with the young poet's experiences and literary philosophy. That a youth so inexperienced in life, so poor, and so desperately ill could write what many believe to be the greatest series of odes in English is astounding. I remember being blown away by Keats's odes in my high school English class, and now Stanley Plumly has written a book that explains to me why.

Keats's opening lines of his long poem, Endymion, certainly applies to his own work:

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

Maybe because I recall with haunting clarity a visit made years ago to the small apartment above the Spanish Steps in Rome where the 25 year old poet, John Keats, died .... I was moved, engaged and enlightened by this wonderfully-written record of the poet's last days. Plumly's writing is masterly, the information well delivered. A book to enjoy and muse over. Carey Roberts

I am an college English major from nearly forty-five years ago, and rarely have looked at Keats' poetry since. Plumly's book elegantly recreated for me the milieu of Keats' last few years, when he lived with the certain knowledge that his life was ebbing because of TB--an illness whose signs and symptoms and course he recognized well from his education as a medical student and his experience with the deaths of his mother and brother from the disease. The biographical details of his travels, companions and caregivers, the inevitable course of his illness and the futile attempts to stem its progression, and concomitant production of his extraordinary poetry were fascinating to me. The book gave me a new appreciation of certain poems -- particularly Ode to Autumn -- and made me want to re-read Keats' poetry -- which I am in the process of doing. Some of the extended quotations from his and contemporaries' letters, as well as some extended literary criticism by Plumly were not my cup of tea -- but all in all, this was a wonderful book. I passed it along to my college roommate, also an English major, knowing he would enjoy it as well. Any reader remembering the beauty of Keats' poems and wanting a illuminating entry into their restudy would enjoy this book very much.

I read the Ricks' review of this book in the NY Times and ran to get it. Ricks is the best Tennysonian I have ever read and i respect his work a lot. However, I was a bit perplexed at all the hoo-ha. First, you must come to this work very well-versed in your Keats--both his poetry and his life. So if you have not read (about) Keats, this is not the autobiography for you. That said, Plumly is clearly besotted with his subject matter, and that can be good and bad. His imagistic, tender, subjective musings can also be jarring and confusing. His use of the present tense is pretentious, and sometimes he goes way overboard with his own poetic musings on the poet's feelings about death (all conjectural).

And yet, a lot of this book is compelling simply because of the emotion behind it, the sheer investment. However, if you want to know about Keats' youth, his boyhood, you get almost nothing. The lack of sequence can also be annoying--you are forever returned to that ghastly death-chamber. It gets to be too much. Also, Plumly tries to outdo Keats in terms of the sensuality, the fullness, of his figurations--as if he is competing with the poet. A no-win situation.

So I give a divided review here. i am glad I read this book but do not feel as if i gained much knowledge about the poetry or the poet. i did learn a lot about TB and 19th c quackery, however.

"Posthumous Keats" is described as a personal biography, of John Keats, of course, one of the famed English "Romantic Poets" of the early 19th Century, who, in a very short life, gave us such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The book has been authored by Stanley Plumly, a talented, prize-winning poet himself, currently Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Plumly has won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Keats was only 25 years old when he died in 1821, after an agonizing year-long struggle with tuberculosis, in Rome, where he'd gone to flee the harsh English winter. He left behind, too, a secret engagement, and an ambivalent relationship, never consummated, with Miss Fanny Brawne. He was almost alone in Rome, little-known and quite poor; but at his death, he did also leave behind several devoted friends, and family members, many in possession of "fair copies" of his best-known poems, and a great deal of insightful correspondence. Their memorialization made his short life, significant work, and hard death the stuff of undying legend.

Plumly has obviously done a great deal of research in creation of this work, and it shows. "Posthumous Keats" is full of highly-interesting information, on England, particularly London; and Italy, particularly Rome; as they existed in the 19th century; on the social life and organization of those societies as they then existed, and most particularly on the parlous state of medicine then. Seems like the universal cures were laudanum (an opium derivative) and bleeding, just what a tubercular patient needed. Furthermore, as a poet himself, Plumly is extremely well-qualified to explicate Keats' limited oeuvre. He also has a poetic writing style: in fact, the book's an excellent combination of subject and author. However, it's nearly 400 pages long, and I wouldn't call it easy reading, or particularly accessible. There is no biographical material on the subject per se, I can't think why not: anyone already familiar with the poet's life need not have read it. And just a page or two's worth of introduction would have been most helpful, instead of the teasing little hints about the poet's life that Plumly drops here and there.

Finally, and I know I've gone on about this subject before, but the illustration situation in this book is dire. They are very few, quite small, in muddy black and white, at the heads of chapters. They aren't identified on site; the reader must look to the end of the book to discover their titles; then back to the beginning of the book, to discover their page locations again. And: the illustrations are discussed in the book's text, but nowhere near their actual locations: what general reader is going to look back through the text to find the discussions of the illustrations?

So I'm afraid I can't recommend it for the general reader, which I consider myself to be. I've said it before elsewhere, but it probably bears repetition, in the interests of disclosure; I never have been a great fan of the English Romantic Poets. The required course in this subject caused me to drop the English major at Cornell University, after I'd bought the six required books of poetry, one of them Keats,' to be sure, and realized, once again, that they weren't for me. And during my stay in Rome, I certainly found my way to the Spanish Steps, but, thoughtlessly, never to the house where Keats died, now a museum, in plain view from the site. Still, I was eager to learn more about Keats, his life and work, from this book. And, mind you, I did. But only with a certain amount of difficulty, and not as much as I hoped to. "Posthumous Keats" should be welcomed by special interest readers, but general readers, be warned.

This is a gorgeous book. It is also heartbreaking. Plumly brings to Keats the generosity of heart and the capaciousness of mind ("negative capability," some might call it) required to enter deeply into the late poetry and the astoundingly painful last year of the poet's life. This book is, I think, guaranteed to make you love Keats more and, just possibly, like doctors less!

Unfortunately this book contains at least one factual mistake (Leghorn isn't a "little port town" near Livorno) and one long description of Rome that borders on gibberish (p. 273), making me wonder if the author has ever been there. There are interesting bits, but overall the seven essays/meditations are disappointing considering Plumly's stature and obvious love of his subject matter.

of course if u absolutely love keats--certainly there are treasures in this book-- and it will interest a keats lover despite the fact that to me this book seems a bit pretentious and might even be just badly writtten/edited--- oh it sounds literary-- and the descriptioons are o so poetic-- all conjecture about things this writer imagines-- but its often repetitive and ludicrous---and the imagination of the writer seems a bit sophomoric and limited----am i going too far saying its an outright injustice to keats and i bet he would have hated it too ? ----it does go on and on quite a bit about fairly unintersting things-- like a bad movie--w only intermittent insight into the man & his poetry--- the poet lived not 25 years--- he was sick consumptive died of tb--- was ridiculed in his time as a less than minor poet who critics at the time dismissed---he fled england ended up by the spanish steps in Rome and died there----in fair obscurity --- i still think keats is a bit over rated and dramatic-- he thought the world of himself-- all the more painful i guess to be dismissed in his own time-- yer he somehow knew he would be remembered-- but not very well by this charlatan writer and obvious sychophant who seems to think every imagined moment of this poor guys life was worth retelling--from his paltry imagination and letters keats left behind----he weaves an almost irrelevant bio-- dont waste yer time unless yer a real keats freak but be prepared for what i found to be many annoying passages --- read the stuff the poet wrote of course-not this lame professor who is probably gripped by the publish or perish nonsense at our universities-- where professors who write books like this seem to become as sophomoric as their students--- i can imagine keats coughing up blood while reading this and being embarrassed by it---finally embracing his obscurity-- and gladly shuttling off his mortal coil !