Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography

Book excerpt: 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.