 Well good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome you here to Alden Library. I'm Scott Seaman, Dean of Libraries and I get the honor of introducing our speaker for today. Dr. Stanley Plumlee was born in Barnesville, Ohio and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio. He attended Wilmington College, which is in Wilmington, Ohio, not too far from here, and he earned his MA and PhD from Ohio University. His honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His 2008 book, Posthumus Keats, a Personal Biography, was runner-up for Penn's Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography. His 2009 book, Old Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Patterson Poetry Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2010, Dr. Plumlee was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent collection of poems is titled Orphan Hours. His latest non-fiction work, just out in paperback, for which we'll hear about today, is The Immortal Evening, a legendary dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb. This book won the Truman Capote Prize for literary criticism. Dr. Plumlee is presently Professor of English at the University of Maryland and since 2009 has been Maryland's poet Laureate. Joining Dr. Plumlee this afternoon for our conversation is Dr. Jill Allen Rosser. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the New Ohio Review and has done that for the past eight years. Her forthcoming collection, her fourth collection of poems, Mimi's Trapeze, appeared in 2014 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Stanley Plumlee and Jill Rosser. Welcome back to Ohio Stan and to Athens and to the Ohio University campus where you spent a number of years. A long time ago. Yeah, hasn't changed. Fifty years as a matter of fact, half a century. It has changed. Well I'm really excited to talk to you about this book which is a real thrill for me to read because the main characters, actual people at this dinner are so well known and such heroes of mine. Now I don't know how well you can see that the act of painting that is there's an inset here of a picture of Keats and Wordsworth up sort of in the right upper right quadrant there. Not probably can't see it too well but there's a pillar and another pillar and in between there are two heads who are speaking together. I guess we can't see it that well. I'll do a visual aid. Hope I'm not connected by a wire. We'll find out. This is Christ by the way. Not a very good one, sorry to say. Hayden couldn't get it right. He was a really pretty average painter and many of his critics came to believe it was more of a self-portrait than anything else. That profile is Keats. It's actually one of the best ever done. A fiery Auburn headed individual. That fellow is William Burwick who is a student of Hayden's. There's Wordsworth looking like a monk. Almost have a call over his head and then there are fantasy figures. That's Voltaire and that's Newton. Hayden was a committed Christian. He saw Voltaire as an awful atheist so he puts him in there on purpose to embarrass him, I guess, in the afterlife. Whereas he saw Newton as at least a Christian. He had no notion that Newton was really interested in alchemy and all kinds of weird magical possibilities besides other more scientific interests. Can I ask, Hayden is the painter who had hosted this dinner and brought these people together and he was often introducing artists and writers to each other which was his main good role on earth, I think. He was a little deluded maybe about his talent as many of us are. Many of us geniuses. Not entirely. Well it's one thing to be deluded. It's another to insist on it your whole life. Which is something that he did. Well he had a double role actually as he was a painter and what you might call a professional borrower of money from his acquaintances and friends and often his friendships were pragmatic as you point out in the book that he needed friends who could help him survive. Keats was one who couldn't help him and Charles Lamb was another. Didn't have a whole lot of money to offer but they were so compelling to him. And so what I was wondering is what happens in this book is we're expecting to hear all about Wordsworth and Keats and Lamb and we do. But gradually you begin to understand in the book that Hayden is the central figure and I wondered when you first conceived of writing this book if that was your intention or if it happened while you were composing the book that you realized you had a real fascination for his preoccupations and his lofty ambitions and his incarcerations for debt. That's a good question. In the sense that many things come together when you're at the beginning of a project or imagining what it might become the painting was first of all interesting and the fact that it was a kind of a mess of different possibilities and some of it and the best part of the painting is these characters the rest of it is sort of anonymous and vague actually. But then Hayden became more interesting to me because it was clear that he had somehow been programmed however life works this way to fail. In spite of the fact that he saw himself as a great painter and a great success and kind of the self delusion there is a wonderful subject the difference between reality and was actually true. His problem was that he saw himself in the role of restoring English art as historical painting. It was in somewhat of a abeyance at that time. The painters Constable and Turner are emerging as great landscapeists. That was already true in Europe. So history painting was on the wane. So Hayden is going to rescue it. The trouble is he's not that good a painter and all his subjects have to do with mostly Christian history and his notion of what the painting should be was a wall-sized work of art. A work of art so large no one could buy such a thing because it would never be a place to put it. And it wasn't good enough that it would necessarily sell. Maybe if we have time I can talk about the history of what happens to this painting because it ends up in Ohio which is where it is now. You can go see it in Cincinnati. We'll get to that story perhaps. So he's painting these great almost mural-sized works and nobody can buy them. They're usually not that good. They get usually pretty bad reviews. The worst part is it takes him forever to do one. This painting will take him six years and he's in his third year when he holds the dinner party and he's just completed this portion of the painting and one of the reasons for the dinner party is he wants to show these friends of his what he's done. They've sort of seen it in process over time because most of Hayden friends are writers not painters because he's just impossible. I don't know if you've seen a film called Mr. Turner. Some of you may have. Hayden does come. He's not as bad as he appears in that film by the way but he's pretty pathetic in the Mike Lee film. And there was great pathos in his life. Most of it as Joel pointed out having to do with debt. Now debt in this early 19th century era is a curious thing. You could be in debt if you could afford it. Maybe that's still true. I mean you weren't going to be hectic and you weren't going to be put in prison for it if you had a certain social standing. He went to debtor's prison four different times. And it wore on him of course and his family that much more each time. And what that meant was that all your property was confiscated and sold at auction. And so his few friends or those who would who had any sense of decency in his regard would ultimately bail him out and restore his painting equipment and that kind of stuff. But at this point in the story he hasn't yet gone for the first time in debtor's prison. This is probably the high moment of his life. And that's also very interesting because it's a great moment for all of them. How much of the dinner party should I describe for example Heads is 22. Wordsworth whom he wants to meet and that's a second reason for the dinner party is 47. I don't know if you know a lot about the romantic poets. Heads is just beginning his career as a poet really. As I said to a group yesterday he writes most of his great work in a semester. Good thing he wasn't on the quarter system. But that comes later. Wordsworth of 47 is just beginning to be really famous and acting the role. He's really impossible to be around. He's so pompous. Well the book is largely about friendship and how important it was to these artists to be fired up and feel supported. But I was about to say two late-comers to the dinner party whom no one knows are a young man who's on his doctor who knows Keats' brothers who's on his way to Africa. He's decided doctoring isn't his name is Richie. He's Richie has decided it's just not for him. So he's going to become an explorer in Africa and his goal is to discover the source of the river Niger. When Charles Lamb very much a man of wit here's about this. He turns to him and says so you're the young man who's going to Africa to die. A year and a half he's dead over there. And the other uninvited but should not have been invited but shows up guest is John Kingston who says he has been in correspondence with William Wordsworth. The great now great William Wordsworth. Well it turns out he's the head of what you would call the Postal Service and Tax Collection in Britain but he's one of seven actual commissioners. And he's Wordsworth's boss because Wordsworth like Hayden needs to make a living. And he has become essentially Tax Collector. He's a Tory by this time. Has become a Tax Collector and a man who you know deals in the stamps business in the Cumberland world in north of England. And he decide Kingston decides because he's he's sort of bewildered by this company. He has no idea what a poet is or who poets are. To lord it over Wordsworth. So it becomes a also an evening of humiliation for Wordsworth. It's supposed to be you know a great celebration of these poets. And so Kingston ends up being attacked by everybody particularly Charles Lamp and I think that's kind of fun in the book too. But to me it was kind of nice to see Wordsworth get his because he could really be a pompous ass. A great poet. I kind of wanted to slap him around a little bit after I read. Now Mr. Wordsworth is not interrupted. That kind of thing. And that's why one of the interesting things about the book is that you tell us who's not there and why not. Coleridge for example who's best friends with Lamb. Exactly a lot of a lot of people should have been invited who Shelly should have been invited. Byron could have been invited. They're all in town. Coleridge is an interesting case because at this point he's even worse than Wordsworth. He's what's the word a monologist. He just cannot shut up. The problem is he's also brilliant. We've all known in the academic world we've all known people like that. Some of them have been our professors. Maybe even our friends. But so Hayden can't stand him really. And also there's the subtext that he, Coleridge and Wordsworth, had this problem for several years and they've been trying to work it out but the healing hasn't really occurred and frankly never will after that great early period in their careers. So that's the reason for Coleridge not being there. And Keith wasn't particularly fond of Shelly as you know. Well no they're not friends as far as what you may have heard. Shelly's not invited because he is an atheist. And a vegetarian. This is a thing that really bothers Hayden. And there's a moment, another sort of social center of activity is on Hampstead Heath in the Vale of Health, Leigh Hunt. He's a great organizer of dinner parties as well. And Hayden has gone there more than once. And there's a wonderful moment I think I've spent some time on it. When he's sitting next to Shelly for the first time he's met him. And Shelly as Hayden puts it is fencing with the stalk of broccoli. Treating it as if it were a chicken. Well there is some, I realize there's a lot of humor in this. Yeah no they're hilarious. I mean Charles Lam is the entertainer of the century. I mean he gets a little tipsy at dinner and this employer of Wordsworth who has invited himself essentially to later in the dinner is, well you can tell how he is treated by Lam. Lam is a wonderful man. He's probably the best man in the whole group actually. And if you don't know, he hasn't quite written all those great essays. A fantastic prose writer. He finally gets fed up with this guy and drives him out of the place by asking him if he could examine his head. So he takes the role of a phrenologist and he's all over this guy's head and forehead and just checking him out for intelligence and insight. God knows what. He's talking the whole time. This guy thinks he's under attack, which I guess he is in a way, and he just flies from the place. And everyone's having a great time. They're all drunk as you know, skunks by this time. So it fits the tone of the moment pretty well. But you feel that he deserves a pompous interloper. There is a sense of theater here. You could do the dinner party I think as a play. Yeah I think it would be you know I think it would be you could do three acts or something and you speak of Hayden as the the facilitator never the innovator and the catalyst and never the creator and it's so important with the Elgin marbles for example and bringing those to the fore. They were sitting in a shed somewhere until Hayden made noise about it. It's sort of shocking. Well the Elgin marbles, Lord Elgin, had brought these you know everyone knows this story. He had brought and discovered these great Greek sculptures I guess you'll have to call all of them in Greece of course and they were being just destroyed and they are they are a broken vessel that's part of their charm really the nature of the ruins by the way are really interesting you know that that's where the imagination lives among ruins. So he manages to get them because this is an era of great imperialism, British imperialism. He manages to get them shipped in various stages to Britain and it becomes the basis the the Elgin marbles marbles become the basis for the British Museum really. More than once the ship goes down from the weight of these things and it's some effort to get to bring all that stuff back up and they rescue most of it maybe there's somebody out there right now treasure hunter trying to find the last of the Elgin marbles I don't know if that's even possible but but what to do with them the museum hasn't been created yet so he has this area this large shed in his if you know Britain at all near height now what we call Hyde Park that's where he lived there's a shed back of his house and that's where he stores this stuff and more of it comes in more of it comes in but there's no it's chaos there's no order to it and it's really Hayden who first appreciates what's there to his great credit and he becomes one of the forces behind creating the museum that will house this material in the meanwhile he takes people to see in order to sell the fact of these marbles he takes people to see them and he himself spends hours days on end drawing them and those are his best works of art the drawings he did of the Elgin marbles and one of the people he takes to the marbles is John Keats and that is I think the real beginning of the transformation of Keats from being a possible effusive layhunt kind of poet to becoming the poet he ultimately is there's something about the marbles that absolutely riveted his attention and at one point he says to Hayden you know I'm not going to write that kind of endemian style anymore you'll see that the new work will be in a more naked Grecian manner and I think that's road to Grecian or it comes from there is no Grecian earned by the way that's an invention in here I remember years ago there was an ad in New Yorker Keats is Grecian earned could buy it a copy of it we know he did draw some oh yeah yeah there are different versions yeah but they're not that earned it's a combination of what he saw put together in his head right absolutely but that's it that see so Hayden is a facilitator in that in that one sense definitely Hayden ultimately is a writer he kept a wonderful diary that's how we knew all this about the dinner party and God knows what else the problem is that 75% of the diary is nothing but whining, complaining, worrying, anger, God knows what about the situation whatever is it at any given time so well I guess maybe that's what a diary is is therapy but in among all that is a great history of the people he knew and what he was up to and he drew people together who needed to know each other you know in that sense he was a facilitator definitely yeah he was he was gregarious when he needed to be the problem was you he does remind I don't know if I can go into politics it was always something else going on there he used people and as you suggest everybody was a target for money and he and Keats ultimately fall out because he thinks Keats has promised him 200 pounds Keats doesn't have two pounds or he got this notion of you know it's a fantasy but that's a sidebar there is the kids children did actually were pretty well off they didn't know that and ultimately this was proved in court but all after they were all dead and Tickens uses that case in Bleak House yeah jaundice versus jaundice yeah that's the Keats children's story with the law but he he used Keats also for his interest in his artwork I mean I'm just looking at a letter to Keats my dear Keats the friends from Hayden my dear Keats the friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent I had but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness of soul my heart yearned for sympathy believe me from my soul in you I have found one you add fire when I am exhausted and excite fury afresh I offer my heart and intellect and experience and there was a lot of this between many of these writers and they would read their works to each other when they were first written do we don't really have that now except maybe if you exchange well people don't talk like that for sure no and thank god for it yeah no that's those are the sins of youth and I guess excitement and first blush you know they both got over that very very quickly yeah but you know Keats now that we're on him he'd spent a lot of people did actually Hayden studio was open and people would stop by at all hours he was up all night painting it was up by all hours and he'd be working on one of those these monster paintings and there's been this great conversation going on it was sort of behind his back people just would gather there and for Keats who was at the moment he meets Hayden on the cusp of deciding whether in fact he's going to practice medicine or become a poet needs a kind of figure to help him move from one place to the other place uh Keats uh as against a popular opinion was an excellent medical student in spite of all those flowers he would draw in the lecture notes that he was taking at Guy's hospital but this is before anesthetic and so in the demonstrations you have to imagine what that must have been like to have arteries severed and limbs removed or to open up recently deceased bodies by the way Keats that was one of his jobs to receive the grave robbers at the back door so to speak pay them and you know you know get the bodies ready for the next day's demonstration some of those bodies by the way didn't make it to the grave they had been interrupted in life and they did Boris Karlov I guess to remember that so he had all kinds of connections in that world that medical world and he finally he he he says finally I I decided I couldn't go on becoming a surgeon not a physician that's a you had to go to Oxford at Cambridge to become a surgeon because I almost severed the wrong artery one day and that was he said that's what convinced him and yet in his work it's the same with the marbles his work is about what's the phrase he uses one body filling another body that's how I define poetry so he understood the physical world and the human anatomy beautifully and then that's all through his work to the body sculpted or in fact realized as an embodiment but he turned from oh yeah Hayden was part of that that magic that moment he was a model for him and Keats was hard on Wordsworth for selling out right absolutely they all were they all felt Wordsworth had you know compromised himself of course they didn't know the most famous poem they knew by Wordsworth was the excursion they didn't know anything no one did except Coolidge and even he didn't know all of it this this thing and that became 13 books that Wordsworth was writing which became an epic of the self it changed poetry forever this the whole concept of this thing that was later called the Prelude but no one knew about that and some of the greatest writing in literature not just English literature is in that poem and if you don't and also some of the most boring moments you can imagine in poetry it's just it just goes on and on and on but at its best there's nothing like it it just changed it changed the world of language the poetry lives in but Keats wasn't aware of this they none of them were in fact it wasn't published until in any form until Victorian era and I think the best part of it is the kind of trying out of the Prelude called the two-part Prelude which is a thousand lines and I think the first 500 the first half part one is is unsurpassed in in our literature and it wasn't published until 1970 so it's a modern poem Jonathan Wordsworth in the Norton series published it did the notes and all of that I highly recommend it to you it's an amazing performance it's it's truly modern in a time when it wasn't we weren't quite there yet so you never can you never want to confuse the individual with the art even though somebody wrote that stuff and it was that individual but and I guess you have to forgive people whatever their problems are if they have this other thing going most of us would just you know ourselves Stan let me ask you I know that you have an interest in Constable and Turner also that there's a book that you're currently underway about these two painters can I say and they're in there they are they show up yeah but you were apparently an art student the only reason I think I know that is from a poem see that's a gross example that that's a terrible thing to say well you can say whatever you want in poems to me that's right up there with being the poet laureate of Maryland which by the way I hope is over this summer I'm gonna O'Malley appointee who is by the way a very interesting man who loves Irish poetry and could put volumes of it I'm surprised he hasn't done it on that that would not have won on many books I'm sure but still no we have a new governor we have a republican and it's time for somebody else to get that job that's a terrible job but then what was the other part the split second where maybe you were thinking about spending your life on a canvas rather than no I there I was I'd my little Quaker college I had been the editor of the literary magazine and we published bad words and they tried to throw me out of school so but they didn't they couldn't do it that was and I had refused in those days in the late 50s you had to sign loyalty to get scholarship help which is all government funded and the loyalty of said you were not a communist I'm not a communist I did most of you're too young to even know what I'm talking about but that was a serious business in those days so I owed them a little money and it wouldn't give me a transcript to go to graduate school to come here as a matter of fact so I saw I was angry and arguing with the registrar and walked out the door there was this ad for an art teacher the art teacher was elderly and it was sick and they needed somebody right away to complete that semester at a private school nearby and I had a lot of art history courses I had taken some drawing and painting even the sculpture class and I was a terrible artist but they gave me this job and really that was my first real teaching experience I was I got to be pretty good at it because it you could talk about what the student it was the student who did the work and you knew what was good and what wasn't good and all they had to do was keep at it I had some pretty good students I really learned to teach writing doing that and that paid off the debt came to you well and many of your poems are very painterly distinctly painterly well I've come to a theory maybe if I live to be 90 I'll write another book on this same subject I think poems are generally speaking ecphrastic and if it isn't a literal work of art it's something you have put together up here and sort of modeled in your head you've turned that thing into a landscape or a still life or whatever a dramatic encounter among people between people or another person in yourself whatever but it's here and you're really speaking to that I'll use a debased word picture in the poem you're really seeing that moment so the problem is to find a language for that experience what is the language of the experience of that experience you have to find that so you keep writing yourself into that and it will change you can see it differently but I really think that experience for a writer must become a kind of work of art however chaotic or unclear in order to get to the page maybe I'm talking about myself really more than anything else but it seems to me it works that way yeah and one of the quotes that I love in the book is about when Keith was sick and wasn't getting out much and he said my my imagination is my monastery and I am its monk and and so it's all really right that shelly by the way does oh it's a letter to Shelly where he says to Shelly you know you're not doing well it's it's really a criticism of Shelly's work he makes no bones about it he said you need to put more ore in your riffs and what he's saying is you're too abstract you know there's not enough texture there's not enough detail there's not enough grounding it's too visionary too ethereal I guess if you were hating it's too vegetarian you need a little more meat in those poems it's quite a letter yeah and that's what he says you know there are days when I my imagination is a monastery it's a fantastic thing to say and you know if you think about oh to oh to a night and gale the the vivid sensual qualities you smell what he's smelling you see what he's seeing and it's it's so powerful that I think he sat in front of the Elgin marbles for hours and to simplify I think and get something real in his poems we don't ever seize the bird it's all the vocal is the visual but it's more real than most birds you read about that were there not near pumps I know you write about birds a lot of birds almost every other home bird show up now come on they're all right yeah they're there but uh but you know Charles Brown as you saw bright star uh or I have read any uh well it's in here in the in the Keats book too this one um Charles Brown his uh his friend is uh at that time probably his best friend who writes the epitaph famous epitaph that's in the cemetery in Rome claims that Keats came in you know all these scraps of paper with these stanzas all in disorder and that he helped Keats put them in a sequence that makes sense well get out of here uh first of all that poem is so exquisitely formally written and so precisely musically written in that invented stanza which is the kind of combination of the Spensarian stanza and the English sonnet uh it's 10 lines uh 0 to a 9 yellows 80 lines uh eight stanzas um it's it's impossible to imagine that you know this is so in several contradicts that story too no he'd he'd been listening to Nightingale's quite a bit in fact the one time he meets Cooleridge is on the Heath on a Sunday walk in April and Cooleridge is with his um Manuresis with meaning his doctor who supplies him you know with the coke um and it's a Sunday late Sunday morning and uh Dr. Green is his name but he's also been a demonstrator at Guy's hospital so he knows who Keats is and they will Green and Cooleridge are walking this way and Keats on the path Maiden Lane it's called walking that way they pass Keats knows it's Cooleridge but it's too shy to stop and Dr. Green says to Cooleridge I believe that's Mr. Keats because Cooleridge knows who he is he's published quite a few poems by this time and Cooleridge says to Green well uh call out his name and catch him up so Keats comes back and they walk for a while together talking now Cooleridge's memory of this as he writes it down is that the conversation lasted less than five minutes and that uh Keats was uh very slack not well dressed young man but when he shook his hand on parting he knew there was death in that handshake that's Cooleridge's version Keats's version is if it lasted 45 minutes and that Cooleridge wouldn't shut up and it just went from here to there all all over the place but his one complaint because he lived in Highgate just north of the Heath if you know anything about Hampstead where Keats lived was right south right across east Heathrow that's where the Keats house is in fact this complaint was the fucking Nightingale's they wouldn't shut up now the reason the Nightingale's are wonderful is that all the other birds are going to sleep these are insomniacs these birds and they're up half the night singing and running and perousing around so they were keeping him away a week after that conversation Keats writes oh to a Nightingale that's I don't think that's an accident of course he's been aware of Nightingale's too but you know that's a great that's such a great poem in terms of what happens in those 80 lines it gets darker it becomes night from dusk to night by the end and so in the best stands of the six stands the first line is I cannot see what flowers are at my feet then he names them sort of a Milton thing we can smell them oh absolutely identified them by odor it's not just the other sense that kind of citizenship quality I recommend by the way the other great poet Ted Hughes I guess is second half 20th century in England but I think a much greater poet is Philip Larkin check Philip Larkin out he's another one you have to excuse the person from the poems he's the librarian by the way it's okay Larkin was at Hall University poem that is called The Whitsun Weddings it's identical in form to Oh to a Nightingale and yet it couldn't be more different was it say about form it's about a train ride from Hull to London whereas Keats' poem is about stillness and a moment that just transitory just disappears into the dark into the dark ask me another question well Keats was 22 at this dinner and had yet to write his great odes and had he started endymion I think he was in the middle yeah right of endymion yeah and so we have Hayden who believes he's already great and has he painted that christ had six times and thought he got it right the final time but I guess not it's a poem says you erase the face and you do it again so they're like six faces under the too bad we can't have a time but so Keats had yet to do anything great and when Keats died he still believed he had not yet written anything that was going to last is that not true absolutely I think it was a failure and and Hayden not until the very end maybe did he come face to face with his own failures and so it's fascinating to have these two really polar opposites one who was they both believed in their genius but one was just wrong and the other so right and he never knew that which is what is part of the tragedy of Keats what he thought he'd written the odes and he thought what's great is ahead of me I know I can write great poetry well too you know how we die is a great to comment on how we lived that it's at the I sometimes read that it's at the end of this book finally Hayden has had it he can't go into Dennis prison again he just can't he can't face what he what he's become and he knows that he kills himself but he screws that up too his wife and his daughter think he's moving one of those great canvases around you know with a frame the earless noise in the studio which is right below where they live and the daughter the next day the next morning discovers it because this happens in the middle of the night discovers what had happened he had that morning of his death he'd gone out and bought two pistols wrote out his will which goes on for 10 pages and he has nothing anyway and so he shoots himself in the head misses it bounces the bolt bounces off his skull and so the other pistols lying there forget it so he takes his a painting knife cuts his throat it doesn't quite work so he starts staggering around you know like a stuffed pig so all this blood everywhere does it again and finally dies but the blood is everywhere and when the daughter comes in the next where she was she doesn't talk about this ever until right before her own death she goes into the painting room and starts stepping in on this substance and thinks it's paint we know what it is it's an amazing moment yeah and you end the book on yeah on that scene which is a risky wow you know he starts out being the great host and finally gives it but you see Keith the reason this is that's his word he would say periodically in those last 18 months when he didn't write when is this posthumous posthumous existence going to end because he thought he was dead he thought he was dead and he isn't discovered for the longest time it's like another 50 years before anyone really begins to appreciate who he is and then we have to wind this up the poet who really discovers Keith's is Tennyson and his little group at Cambridge a group that contains these young painters who have read the more romantic narratives Eve St. Agnes and whatever and started to illustrate them and they become the pre-Raphaelites celebrated by the infamous John Ruskin who is by the way plays a big role in this new book he was a strange character for sure yeah well I you know if people have to leave yeah well yeah maybe more questions maybe somebody wants to ask why did you bring that up I hope you weren't there too recently it's a pretty bad oh good so your memory is distorted yeah oh yeah absolutely yeah absolutely yeah my family helped found the talent in was actually in the late 1700s they were quicker whalers um from uh whales and uh right across across the Gulf Sea in England and first came to then Tuckett and then Bucks County Pennsylvania migrated west from there there I think there are a couple of streets named after the Plumice there um they're not very long the um there's a Quaker school there that my family sold to uh called the only boarding school but there are 13 I think at least 13 different public families there still I used to do a thing called the James Wright Festival in Martin's Ferry which is in Belmont County too St. Clairsville is a county seat Barnsville is called Up County it's the farm area Martin's Ferry is the industrial on the river town the depression the depression is still there um and the first time I did it the host of the event I did it uh Galway and I did it Galway was a good friend of James Wright well I knew him too but um the host of the event calls one of my relatives I didn't I didn't know who he was his name is Robert Plumlee and asks if because he knows there are so many Plumlee's in that area if he would alert the family that I was going to be in the area reading and talking about myself and James Wright whatever he said uh oh yes we're aware uh of Stanley but uh you know I'm a poet too and he starts reading his dog roll on the telephone you can't account for who you're related to I still haven't met him you know so what else about Barnsville God forbid right oh yeah I spent a lot of time in Yellow Springs I don't think people can hear the question everybody but he's asking about Yellow Springs in Barnsville yeah well Antioch College was there that was uh I took a lot of classes over there that was just next door really um yeah in terms of the natural world absolutely because my all my family were farmers and my grandfather uh was in the lumber business there in Barnsville and I have a photo it was on one of my books actually of the first big log they brought in the Ohio I heard about it from an uncle it was in the Ohio Historical Society and they they gave me a copy of information to use it it was this giant log on a lumber truck a ford and there was a banner across the log PW Plumlee Lumber Corporation my uncle Paul is on top of the log sitting my grandfather is on the other side in a white hat and white shirt and my father was 19 is the driver and he's outside the cab of the truck sort of with his arms folded looking you know important and then all these townspeople are in the photo uh which book is that it's kind of an amazing shot and this is in the 30 early 30s of course my grandfather went bankrupt there and then moved to Winchester Virginia started over and built up a big company there and uh which is where I lived my first seven years that was in Winchester even though it was born at Barnsville Tell us the story of where the painting is there are no art galleries and a few painters had small rooms where they would show their work most famous of whom was Turner he had his own gallery so if you wanted to show your work you had to rent space and Hayden rents a place and it's still off Piccadilly called Egyptian the Egyptian Hall and um custom again he had to borrow and beg and so forth uh it puts up some other artwork but the but the main thing he wants to show off is this painting and so there's this big thousands of people come see it he actually does make money but he wants too much money for the painting so whenever I could buy it to make a long story short but it it's up for about six months and he does very well um so and all kinds of people come and admire it and then say nice things about it they all complain about the Christ figure but that gets passed over and uh they're very interested in these guys in the painting so that's part of the attraction so it doesn't get sold like a lot of the great wall-sized stuff uh of Hayden's where to put it so he stores it for a while and finally when he really needs money he sells it to um a it's not exactly an art dealer he's kind of an antiques dealer in Philadelphia to sad moment when Hayden sees this painting rolled up like a rug giant rug you know on this boat leaving uh London well actually uh down to Graves Inn and then Southampton and off off to Philadelphia well when the guy gets the painting he realizes it's just too big so he gives it to the archdiocese of Philadelphia it's Catholic you know and they frame it and hang it up for a while but it they don't really have the right space for it and uh and when the clergy turns over people die and new people take over uh they give it to uh archdiocese in Cincinnati and this is like maybe 150 or more years ago and it just gets folded up again in the in the basement and slowly but surely uh something uh Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Norwood around Sides of Steddy realize they may have something on their hands of historic input not aesthetic and so they reframe it touch it up it's a mess and they've built a space for it air conditioned and so forth uh where you can where you can see it and that's where it is today in Cincinnati Ohio you know which by the way Keith's brother George had recently passed through on this way to Illinois to join one of those you know societies ideal the courage was interested in he never makes it because he he loses every cent to uh another kind of artist who cheats him out of all his money by having him invest in a boat where he's going to make a lot of money cutting up down the Ohio River delivering whatever uh a barge like thing except it's on the bottom of the river and his name is James John James a lot of them who who swindled I don't know how many people it was a really interesting crook besides being the great bird harvest uh anyway so he ends up in Kentucky George Keats does had nothing to do with this painting however some people have claimed that you have a real fascination for people across paths constables clouds for Keats is a poem that I've just talked to my class about where they never met they never met but they were in the they were like a block away I know how is that it's just something about constable I think possible new words with the courage I thought they were kind of you know he was too he was more Tory than where it was actually um yeah but so so I have and uh uh uh uh uh uh uh cool which is a really interesting painter and his wife is dying and he's in Hampstead uh for her health uh and in those days Hampstead was referred to as the lungs of London because if you were down by the river you know very swampy and awful you know so he went up to Hampstead which is a high place north of London proper at that time and um it goes on to his backyard constable does uh uh uh and hill terrace and um starts looking at the sky because that's so much of his uh earlier subject and will continue to be in his really great work that will follow and starts painting the sky no not the sky clouds nothing but clouds I mean there's nothing else in those paintings but clouds he does this for two years there are over a hundred of these and he does them not even watercolor but in oil it's pretty tricky I think those are the first abstract paintings and so that poem is titled constables clouds for Keats I imagine because they're really uh a constable's fond of saying the emotion in a painting is in the sky and what brings the sky to life what animates it but clouds it's part of the landscape so well don't I read this and then we'll call it a day it's a good idea go get a glass of wine okay constables clouds for Keats remember now Keats is uh going to be buried in Rome in the so-called Protestant cemetery they come in off the sea peaceable masters and hold the sea in the sky as long as they can and you write them down in oils because of their brilliance and to remember in its turn each one it's 1822 after the Regency and it would be right in the year after his death to think of these domed above the heath in their isolated chronicle as elegies of the spirit right to see these forms as melancholy hosts even at this distance yet dead Keats is amorphous a shapelessness reforming in the ground and no one you know enough to remember he lies in the artists he lies in the artists paradise in Rome among the pagan souls of sheep at pasture you'll lie in Hampstead where he should have stayed to meet you on your walks of lower terraces or along the crowning high street heading home your clouds grow whiter darker more abstract from one elaborate study to the next correlatives or clothes the real sentiment that lives you say in clouds subjects to counterway the airy gravity of trees and leaping horses keats could have met you you must have seen him once against the light at least he could be crossing on christ church hill road now then over to the elm row and down old admiral's walk he could be looking at the clouds blowing between buildings watching the phantoms levitating stone he was there your first heath summer writing odes feeling the weather change from warm to chill focused no less than you on daylight's last detail wondering what our feelings are without us please join me once again in thanking dr stanley plumley and jillian rosser for this afternoon that stanley will stay with us for just a few more minutes if anyone has any questions they'd like to ask directly of him please also remember there are evaluations or even indirectly there's evaluation forms please take a moment to fill them out if you do and hand them to kathy or to barbara in the back you get a free library t-shirt that offers just for today and just for you so please take a moment to do that and thank you all for coming