Posthumous Keats

A Personal Biography

9 February 2010

Description

A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book and a Washington Post Best 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

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. In this close narrative study, Stanley Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality, an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats. 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.

Reviews

"… there have been any number of excellent books published in 2008 whose relevance to our lives will endure beyond the excitability of the moment. Stanley Plumly’s richly evocative Posthumous Keats, a tour de force of poet-sympathy across the decades." — Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement

"Stanley Plumly has written a haunting study in which the poet’s death overhangs and informs the life… [he] is the ideal companion on what he sees as Keat’s meandering path to both mortality and immortality… The book… has the wisdom, delicacy and insight of long knowing and reading, and of love." — The Economist

"This is, then, a remarkable book. You need not take my word for it. Christopher Ricks, who knows his onions about Keats, has raved about it; and Jack Stillinger, editor of Keats’s Complete Poems, said “It’s certainly the best book ever written about Keats (and I’ve read all the others) and may be the best book anybody has written on any writer.” Endorsement enough, I think." — Nicholas Lezard’s Choice, The Guardian

"[Posthumous Keats] manages to shed more light on Keats and his world than any biography could do… Not only has Plumly produced a powerful meditation on Keats, but he has managed also to write that rare thing — a convincing analysis of the creative process." — Duncan Wu, The Telegraph

"Plumly’s luminous biography." — The Independent

"Mr. Plumly writes beautifully and very movingly." — Charles McGrath, The New York Times

"Plumly has written a book to last: worthy of its subject and commensurate with both words of its title." — Robert Pinsky, Slate

Also By: Stanley Plumly

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