Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography - Softcover

"Plumly has written a book to last: worthy of its subject and commensurate with both words of its title." -- Robert Pinsky - Slate "Mr. Plumly writes beautifully and very movingly." -- Charles McGrath - The New York Times "Plumly's luminous biography." -- The Independent "[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 "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 "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 "... 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

This is the result of 20 years of reflection on the part of the author on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romantic poets. Keats, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry and therein, Plumly argues, lies his tragedy.