Stanley Plumly

A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.

A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb

The Immortal Evening

A probing and commanding final volume from a master poet facing his own mortality.

Poems

Middle Distance

"Following his 'obsessive, intricate, intimate, and brilliant' (Washington Post) work in Posthumous Keats and The Immortal Evening, renowned poet Stanley Plumly further explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain's supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter's life influence his work? Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from personal tragedy, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists' lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime"--

Constable and Turner and the intimate sublime

Elegy landscapes

William Matthews

Sebastian Matthews

A definitive treasury of poetry by the award-winning late poet includes works from his eleven previous collections, as well as never-before-published poems, that explore the great pleasures--love, music, wine, and language--that serve as consolation for life's sufferings. Reprint.

Collected Poems of William Matthews

Search Party

New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000

Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

The probing, commanding final volume from "one of contemporary America’s most gifted and influential lyric poets" (David Baker, Kenyon Review). After a diagnosis of cancer, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly found himself in the middle distance—looking back at his childhood and a rich lifetime of family and friends, while gazing into a future shaped by the press of mortality. In Middle Distance, his final collection, he pushes onward into new territory with extended hybrid forms and revelatory prose pieces. The result is the moving culmination of a long career, a work of fearless, transcendent poems that face down the impending eternal voyage. Plumly populates this collection with tender depictions of poets, family, and friends—the relationships that sustained him throughout his life—as well as unflinching self-portraits. In “White Rhino,” for instance, he adopts the voice of the “last of [his] kind,” using the rare creature as a canvas to depict the dying, aging poet himself. In “Night Pastorals,” he writes vividly and movingly about being on his deathbed, with fragmentary impressions of the other side. In profound lyric narratives, Plumly reaches out to a past that feels closer than ever, returning to the Ohio of his childhood and the shadows of a country at war. Blending documentary and memoir with his signature Keatsian lyricism, Middle Distance contemplates at every turn the horizons of Plumly’s life.

Middle Distance: Poems

Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College

Michael Collier

The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry includes more than 80 of America's most vital poets writing at the end of the century. Comprehensive and eclectic, the anthology provides an impressive and representative range of poetic voices and styles. Most of the poems have been written in the past five years and most have not yet been collected in books. As a result, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry is unusually fresh, immediate, and perfect for classroom use as well as pleasure reading. Includes Agha Shahid Ali, Frank Bidart, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Louise Glueck, Marilyn Hacker, Michael Harper, Edward Hirsch, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Campbell McGrath, Heather McHugh, William Matthews, W. S. Merwin, Linda Pastan, Robert Pinsky, Alberto Rios, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, James Tate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Rosanna Warren, C. K. Williams, C. D. Wright, Charles Wright, and many others.

The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry

An acclaimed American poet reflects on the life and legacy of John Keats. Posthumous Keats is the result of Stanley Plumly's twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romanticists. 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. Keats, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five, saw his mortality as fatal to his poetry, and therein, 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, whose poetic influence remains immense. 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.

Stanley Plumly

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