Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography

Abstract

Posthumous is the result of twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romantic poets. John Keats' 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. Keats, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-five, saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry and therein, Stanley Plumly argues, lies his tragedy: Keats thought he had failed in his mission 'to be among the English poets'.In this close narrative study, 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 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.