The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb

by Stanley Plumly

Overview

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

The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of…those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window into the lives of Keats and his contemporaries in this brilliant new work.

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he referred to in his diaries and autobiography as the “immortal dinner.” He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his most important historical painting thus far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a guest at the party) appeared. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolved into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event would prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals.

A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening regards the dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these legendary artists and to contemplate the immortality of genius.

Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393245806
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/29/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Old Heart, and four books of nonfiction. His honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, among others. Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.

Editorial Reviews

11/01/2014
Picture William Wordsworth in his mid-40s wearing a dressing gown, face covered with the accoutrements of a life mask while painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and editor John Scott secretly snigger at the poet who is oblivious to their reverential gaze. This is one of many intimate moments poetically layered into Plumly's (English, Univ. of Maryland; Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography) work. The author explores the themes of immortality and genius by weaving biographical information with the personal correspondence and the creative works of Haydon, Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charles Lamb surrounding their attendance of Haydon's December 28, 1817 dinner party to celebrate his progress on their portraits within the painting Christ's Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem. Plumly's volume joins Penelope Hughes-Hallett's The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817. VERDICT The title is highly recommended for students of poetry. Readers with an interest in art history will also find Plumly's interdisciplinary approach relevant to the study of 18th- and 19th-century English painters.—Nerissa Kuebrich, Chicago

Library Journal

…Plumly offers an idiosyncratic, heartfelt, at once sinuous and expansive exploration of the dinner, its "aesthetic context and the larger worlds of the individual guests, particularly the three 'immortal' writers, Keats, Wordsworth and Lamb"…In Plumly's graceful prose and propulsive storytelling, the Romantics come alive for us as creative forces and, perhaps more remarkably, as endearing, complex, authentic individuals.

The New York Times Book Review - Priscilla Gilman

08/25/2014
Written with great eloquence and insight, this meticulously detailed historical recreation from Plumly (Immortal Yeats) breathes life into a pivotal moment in the British Romantic era. On December 28, 1817, Benjamin Haydon, a painter of historical canvases, hosted a small dinner for his friends William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charles Lamb, all on the cusp of literary immortality. The purpose of the “immortal dinner,” as Haydon later referred to it, was to show off his three years of progress on Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, a massive painting into which he had incorporated the faces of all three friends. By 1820, when the canvas was finally finished, Wordsworth was recognized as England’s greatest living poet, Keats had written his most memorable verse, Lamb was a renowned essayist, and Haydon was himself enjoying a brief spurt of the fame that eluded him most of his career. Although Plumly devotes little more than a chapter to the raucous, lively dinner itself, it allows him to delve into events leading up to it and resulting from it, and to offer astute assessments of the principals’ worldviews and aesthetics. The colorful portrait he paints is that of a select artistic fraternity, frequently contrary in their opinions and attitudes, who nevertheless knew that they were making a significant impact on the spirit of their age. Agent: Rob McQuilken, Massie, McQuilken. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Wide-ranging . . . lyrical . . . and deeply considered . . . an essay on mortality as much as immortality."

Michael Dirda

"Idiosyncratic, heartfelt, at once sinuous and expansive."

New York Times Book Review

"In circling around Benjamin Haydon’s dinner party in 1817, Stanley Plumly directs a beam of brilliant light into the mysteries of art and friendship. Haydon’s own talent (though he misunderstood it) was for portraiture. Plumly has created portraits of Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Haydon so sensitive and revelatory, one feels he must have known them and have attended the party. This book about the passion and heartbreak of art is, itself, a work of art, a majestic achievement."

Rosanna Warren

"Stanley Plumly takes a single dinner, one grand night, and spins it out into a dramatically detailed, compulsively readable, and surprisingly wide-reaching meditation on romantic art and poetry. This book may be as close as we will ever get to sitting at table with some of the nineteenth-century immortals."

Edward Hirsch

"Who but a poet could bring such vitality of imaginative insight to history that a night passed nearly 200 years ago could come back to vivid life? But more than re-creating one extraordinary gathering, Stanley Plumly knows what makes an evening truly immortal: located within those few hours that pass among extraordinary souls in heated conversation lurks the singular imprint of each man’s history and the yet unseen map of time unspooling its fortunes ahead of each. Plumly offers us some outline of fate’s thumbprint as it secretly presses itself down onto four lives, giving us that knowledge these men can sense but not yet see themselves. In doing so, he gives his readers the great gift of showing not only the intermingled yarn of unique lives as they weave together and pull apart—of one evening as it reaches forward and backward into art’s eternity—but also a privileged glimpse into the inner life of the artist and the ongoing struggle of faith, ambition, devotion, vision that undergird not only the greatest works of art but also those that (so humanly) fall short of their lofty mark."

Dan Beachy-Quick

"Stanley Plumly’s The Immortal Evening is a gateway to the Romantics, with the spotlight firmly on Keats, Haydon, and Wordsworth. I can’t think of a more lively, thoughtful, or erudite introduction to them. Plumly’s great gift is to bring their world to life through an act of intuitive sympathy that is the hallmark of a great creative writer, and which can be found nowhere else. The Immortal Evening is destined to become an essential companion to our study of Romanticism in exactly the same way as his earlier Posthumous Keats."

Duncan Wu

"Highly original."

Boston Sunday Globe

2014-09-28
A re-creation of a famous 1817 dinner party hosted by painter Benjamin Haydon for his friends John Keats, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb serves as a way of exploring the lives, artistic sentiments and world views of some of the most influential literary figures of England's Romantic period. When Haydon invited his friends to dinner and tea on Dec. 28th, 1817—a night he would later refer to in his autobiography and diary entries as "the immortal dinner"—he did so for two reasons. The first was to introduce the young emerging poet Keats to Wordsworth, already considered a great Romantic poet. The second was to share his progress on his most important historical painting to that point, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. A massive work that incorporated the faces of Keats, Wordsworth and Lamb, Haydon had spent three years on the painting by 1817 and would spend another three on it before it was completed. Although poet Plumly (Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, 2009) does not spend significant time describing the "lively, even raucous evening" itself, he uses it as a way to ambitiously chronicle the events before and after the meal in each of the artist's lives. The author also adopts a speculative tone when discussing the meal—e.g., after delving into their work to compare their differing views on poetry form: "You have to wonder if any of these issues were discussed or brought up at the immortal dinner." In this exhaustively researched but occasionally digressive book, Plumly uses diary entries, autobiographies, historical accounts and excerpts of the artists' works to explore a key time period in artistic and literary history. Eloquent at times and rambling at others, this colorful historical narrative will be of interest to academics of the Romantic era, but the disorienting chronology and critical jargon may deter some general readers.

Kirkus Reviews