ENTERTAINMENT

The pleasure of this book is that it's a slow read. It lingers, meanders, circles, crisscrosses, overlaps. Poet Stanley Plumly had no wish to retell the familiar story of John Keats' life in a linear way. He was obsessed, rather, with the idea that "certain connections and crossovers" did not fit into strict biographical narrative. He wanted "to walk around in Keats' life and art, not simply through them."

Twenty years in the making, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography is an intricate, fascinating exploration. Mr. Plumly assumes that we come along with an affection for this great English Romantic poet and some knowledge of his so-short life.

All roads in this book, however serpentine, lead to Rome, to that little room by the Spanish Steps where Keats, age 25, succumbs to tuberculosis, where he never writes another poem, where he speaks to himself "in silence, about dying, day in, day out," where he instructs his friend, artist Joseph Severn, to have cut upon his gravestone the sole inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Consumption, as TB was called then, was his family's disease. He had nursed and watched both his mother and his younger brother Tom as they died from the disease. When he first coughs blood, he recognizes the arterial color, and declares "my death-warrant I must die." Yet his doctors decide the trouble is in his stomach and prescribe treatments of bloodletting and starvation diets that continue through his doomed attempt to get well in sunny Italy.

Mr. Plumly ties together Keats' mortality and his ultimate immortality: "The power of Keats' story is so wrapped up in his young, drawn-out, painful death that it is almost impossible to separate that fact from the power of the poems."

The book's unusual structure allows for multiple takes on people, scenes, details, poems, and even Keats' face. A different artist's portrait is shown at the beginning of each chapter. In the remarkable deathbed drawing done by Severn, it is unclear whether Keats is sleeping or has in fact passed. Mr. Plumly says, "The intimacy, the silence, the imperceptibility of the corporeal crossover, the secrecy with which the breath, the spirit, escapes the body all of this unspoken and unspeakable quality enters into Severn's deathbed portrait."

Mr. Plumly has long been one of our finest poets, a master at making language say what can't be said. With Posthumous Keats he has created a bravura biography that avoids a chronological route. True, if you forget to put in your bookmark you may never get back to exactly where you were. It doesn't matter. You're in a delirium of Keats. Any page is sublime.

Poet Isabel Nathaniel is the author of The Dominion of Lights, which won the Texas Institute of Letters award for Best Book of Poetry.

A Personal Biography

Stanley Plumly

(Norton, $27.95)