Photo by Hope Snyder

Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) was the author of numerous collections of poetry including In the Outer Dark (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Giraffe (1973), Summer Celestial (1983), Boy on the Step (1989), The Marriage in the Trees (1997), and Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (2000), Against Sunset (2017), and the posthumous Middle Distance (2020). His collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He authored four works of prose: Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), which was named runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014), which received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018), and Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry (2003). Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well as Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Stanley Plumly

Awards

Shortlisted — National Book Award, 2007

Winner — Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2007

Winner — Paterson Poetry Prize, 2008

Books by Stanley Plumly

Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly
Stanley Plumly, David Baker, Michael Collier
Hardback, 2025
The definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers
Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly
Stanley Plumly, David Baker, Michael Collier
E Book
The definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.
Old Heart: Poems
Stanley Plumly
Hardback, 2007
"Successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation."—Rita Dove
Old Heart: Poems
Stanley Plumly
Paperback, 2009
A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
Stanley Plumly
Paperback, 2010
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...
Orphan Hours: Poems
Stanley Plumly
Hardback, 2013
A luminous new volume from a National Book Award finalist and recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Orphan Hours: Poems
Stanley Plumly
Paperback, 2013
“Combines stateliness, formal beauty and emotional urgency in rich and musical tapestries of language. . . . Every poem . . . is masterful.”—Washington Post
The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb
Stanley Plumly
Hardback, 2014
A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.
The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb
Stanley Plumly
Paperback, 2016
A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.
Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime
Stanley Plumly
Hardback, 2018
A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters.