Posthumous Keats

April 21, 2008
The great English poet John Keats (1795–1821) wrote his last complete poems in the fall of 1819; already ill from tuberculosis, he traveled to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn in a doomed attempt to get well, and died in Rome after a year of getting worse. The prolific and widely honored poet Plumly (Old Heart
) offers seven informative, overlapping chapters that consider aspects, consequences and echoes from that sad last year of Keats's life. Plumly discusses artists' portraits of the poet (among them Severn's arresting deathbed sketch). He examines the lives and motives of the people closest to Keats, such as the faithful Severn (who outlived the poet by decades), the perhaps faithless (but perhaps not) Charles Brown and Keats's fiancée, Fanny Brawne. He considers Keats's love letters, Keats's medical training, Keatsian and Shelleyan landmarks in Rome, the fate of Keats's manuscripts and, finally, Keats's sense of his own life, as bound up in the poems. Plumly's linked essays incorporate old-school scholarship, but never seem dry or academic in the bad sense: the result feels “personal” indeed, if never autobiographical. At times Plumly seems unsure for whom he is writing. At other times, though, his unstinting admiration and evocative prose promise to create Keatsians yet unknown.

April 15, 2008
A beautifully written work that examines Keats's place among his contemporaries and the definition of poetic immortality, this book nevertheless suffers from a confusing organizational scheme. Noted poet Plumly (poetry, Univ. of Maryland, College Park), a National Book Award finalist last year for "Old Heart", assumes that his readers are fairly familiar with Keats's life and has arranged his biography thematically. While this works well for Plumly's poetic analysis, not surprisingly one of the book's strengths, it will puzzle readers expecting a more traditionally formatted biography. Plumly neglects to explain, e.g., who exactly Fanny Brawne was to Keats (his onetime fiancée) before mentioning several times, offhandedly and without clarification, the great effect "the Brawne family" had on the Romantic poet. Plumly also unrealistically assumes knowledge of certain past events, as when he states that only one person in an 1834 audience would have had "the slightest knowledge of, let alone more than passing interest in, the work of John Keats." Part biography, part poetic analysis, and part hypothesis, this will make a worthwhile addition to the collections of larger academic libraries for its unique critical analysis of Keats's poetry; smaller libraries should stick with more conventional biographies.Megan Hodge, Randolph-Macon Coll. Lib., VA

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