The Man Who Knew Trees

Stanley Plumly knew trees. It was partly the accident of circumstance. His grandfather, P. W. Plumly, a “farmer of trees,” founded the P. W. Plumly Lumber Corporation in Winchester, Virginia, a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. The business employed most of the Plumly family and, during the Second World War, it made millions by catering to the US army’s nearly limitless appetite for lumber. Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (W. W. Norton, 2025), judiciously curated by David Baker and Michael Collier, features 286 poems from 11 collections, providing ample evidence that Plumly returned to his Appalachian lumber baronetcy throughout his life. (He died in 2019, at age 79.) Consider, for example, the cover of his sixth collection, Boy on the Step (1989), which features a photograph of two generations of Plumlys sitting in a Model T, beside them a giant log and a Ford dealership in the background, the picture of American war wealth. Yet, for a poet who wrote about trees, Plumly was decidedly hard-nosed about them: “This is my family’s business, the harvesting of trees, the way you harvest wheat or cattle. It’s a killing, necessary business. [...] The Ojibwa believe that cutting down trees is like the wounding and killing of animals; there is a silent pain.”

Sometimes the pain was louder. In his late poem “Germans,” Plumly recalls his grandfather’s friendship with Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd, later one of the authors of the “Southern Manifesto,” which sought to reverse the desegregation of public schooling after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and who repaid Plumly Sr.’s campaign contributions by assigning German prisoners of war to provide free forced labor for the family’s lumber business in the 1940s. The poem’s opening lines ground us in Plumly’s psycho-mythology, which sees him inflect the blank verse of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude with a distinctly American consciousness forged at the height of the imperial era:

There are eleven of them. Why I remember the exact number is uncertain, perhaps because it’s enough to field a football team. They arrive by train, a short sixty-mile ride west from Washington D.C., to Winchester, Virginia, an old Civil War town that has the distinction of having been exchanged, North and South, more than seventy times, 1861–1865. They’re dressed in army prison khaki green, black boots, and are marched like soldiers—which they are—right through the center of town, right from the station past the Frederick County Courthouse and the Great Red Wooden Apple on its front lawn, past the Greco-Roman-inspired architecture of the Public Library, and on out to the P.W. Plumly Lumber Corporation sawmill. To say they march is probably an exaggeration of their very formal walking, whose stride is nevertheless very military. It’s a parade, maybe 9:00 or so in the morning, May, as I remember, 1944, my father, with his holstered .22 pistol, at the head of the local National Guard that is escorting them to the Quonset hut quarters my grandfather has had specially built for them.

Unfolding over 13 expansive pages of poetic prose, “Germans” goes on to describe the young Plumly’s awkward interactions with the POWs as they worked for his grandfather’s business. Despite his initial diffidence, he eventually understands that they share common ground: they’re outsiders, they’re keen to stay out of trouble, and they’re trying to make sense of a world in which their freedom has been circumscribed, albeit in obviously different ways and for drastically different reasons. In the end, however, what rises above the canopy of history and autobiography is Plumly’s philosophical take on the role trees themselves play on our planet: although “alive with fire,” their “beauty and necessity are inseparable from their function as timber.”

For Plumly, the death of trees is merely the first step in getting to know them. He said as much in an interview with The Atlantic’s Peter Davison, when he recalled accompanying his father on tree-cutting expeditions in the Blue Ridge mountains in the early 1950s: “You could see it in his face how it hurt him to bring them down, especially the really large oaks and poplars. You get to know trees intimately that way, by killing them.” Thus, for Plumly, knowledge begins at the moment of death, often, as in his case, while witnessing that very death.

It is no surprise then that the British Romantic John Keats loomed large in Plumly’s creative life. Keats’s own work had been indelibly shaped by his suspicions—scientifically founded given his years of medical studies—that he would ultimately succumb to the “family disease,” tuberculosis. Despite its title, Plumly’s poem “Posthumous Keats” sees its tragic hero still alive. In the poem, Keats’s doctors have told him to leave rainy England, hoping the warmer climate in Italy will aid his recovery. He has just landed in Naples after a fraught journey by ship, and climbs into a carriage that will take him to Rome in a week. As the poem begins, Keats is sitting in that carriage, coughing up blood, and his friend and eventual biographer, the artist Joseph Severn, is walking beside the carriage, throwing flowers picked along the way through the carriage’s window, bringing his dying friend some momentary joy. But Plumly has no interest in retelling old stories, especially well-worn ones like Keats’s. Which is why all the tragic grandiosity momentarily slips away so that Plumly can use the loyal Severn as his mouthpiece:

Keats is floating, his whole face luminous. 
  
The biographer sees no glory in this, 
how the living, by increments, are dead, 
how they celebrate their passing half in love. 
Keats, like his young companion, is alone, 
among color and a long memory.

Whether writing about trees or Keats, this is the moment Plumly’s poetry wishes not merely to inhabit, but to stretch into a narrative meditation on life itself. Just as Severn stands beside the dying Keats—whose brief life, like Arthur Rimbaud’s, evokes the evanescence of poetry—Plumly stood by the corpses of the green titans his family chopped down for a living. He sees in both situations the blurring of memory, emotions, and visual stimuli that induce the synaptic possibilities of life, experienced most keenly when life is slipping through our fingers.

Plumly’s lifelong interest in Keats later fed into a collection of essays, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), in which he dissects Keats’s trials and tribulations, as well as the notions of literary immortality and “negative capability,” a key concept in Plumly’s work, which he defines as the ability for a poem to exist “eternally in doubt and uncertainties, alive, so to speak, among the ambiguities of a possible afterlife.” The poem “Dutch Elm,” from Against Sunset (2017), is suspended in those multi-leaved ambiguities. Plumly dedicated this sonnet to the trees that formed the heavenly vaults of his lumber baronetcy, or the “ceiling above the lonely sidewalks,” a ceiling that collapsed due to Dutch elm disease, a fungus spread by beetles that reshaped entire natural and urban landscapes in the 1930s after logging concerns imported stock from the Netherlands. In the poem, the doomed tree stands alone above the fluidity of time, as Plumly revisits the “Elm-named streets,” the birds on their branches, and “the stained blue of church windows,” reexperiencing them all and yet allowing himself to dwell in the rapid oscillations of memory, turning that very movement into the engine of the lyric:

And I miss a life of nothing but such moments, as if they’d never 
happened and all you had to go on was their memory 
and the feeling in the memory forgotten but brought back 
again and again because you miss someone you loved forever.

Baker’s engaging introduction provides a great deal of biographical context and firmly situates Plumly in his generation, alongside coevals such as Mark Strand, C. K. Williams, and Charles Wright, among others, a group of writers, who, in Baker’s view, encouraged “expansions of the lyric’s narrative and storytelling capabilities, a strong social conscience, and career-long engagements with poetic form.” As seen in Collected Poems, Plumly’s evolving fixation with kinesis, or raw unceasing movement at the molecular level, appears to confirm Baker’s opinion, and readers may see this quality most on display in Plumly’s final four collections, Old Heart (2007), Orphan Hours (2012), Against Sunset (2017), and Middle Distance (2020). The latter includes “The Ward,” which chronicles Plumly’s time in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy, where he is being given a “Keatsian” mix of medications; he even quotes the latter’s line “dull opiate to the drains” from “Ode to a Nightingale.” Hooked to tubes and instruments, Plumly sits in his corner of the ward surrounded by other afflicted strangers who exist in a bubble of their coping mechanisms, and he wonders how many kinds of cancer there are—musing, in a semi-Shakespearean manner, that maybe there are as many types as there are cells in the universe. His perception of the flow of life around him stops the lyric-narrative dead in its tracks as the poet offers this observation:

                       outside the windows, the cloud 
cells forming and reforming like everything 
inside us. And everything is cancer. 
Everyone is cancer.

Had Plumly been a great painter, he might have modeled himself after John Constable, one of the subjects of his final prose book, Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018), an examination of the lives and works of the British Romantic painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. In fact, the broad brushstrokes and color-smearing techniques in which these painters smudged paint with their fingers or rags to achieve atmospheric effects often serve as a jumping-off point for Plumly’s take on negative capability. The title poem of Middle Distance is a perfect example. Reacting to Constable’s 1819 landscape painting The White Horse, which depicts an idyllic bend in the Stour River in the English countryside, with a barge slowly exiting the frame on the left as two men row a white horse across the water, Plumly seizes the moment to express his wish simply to fade into the single, infinite substance that is life—which philosophers like Spinoza alternately called both God and Nature—as these lines suggest:

And I am the water. 
And the light on the water. And if it 
is possible, having also been of 
the plowed and planted and replanted earth, 
I am the sky domed over the boat boy’s 
possible future, when he then arrives 
and puts to work all that really matters.

As the editors stress in their prefatory note, Collected Poems follows a design Plumly laid out in advance of his death. He meant for the book to be read as a single lyric meditation on life, one that begins with his death and works its way backward. Therefore, the poems appear in reverse chronological order, meaning that the book opens with the previously unpublished “Spots of Time,” found among Plumly’s posthumous papers, and which Baker calls Plumly’s “final great lyric sequence.” We then work our way to the beginning of Plumly’s writing and conclude with his debut, In the Outer Dark (1970), although the very last pages in the book actually belong to additional previously unpublished posthumous poems, among them “Beach” and “Diary,” which appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Poetry.

Plumly insisted on this arrangement, and it mirrors the one he used for his previous omnibus, Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New & Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (2001). Nonetheless, it produces a slightly awkward reading experience. Read nonchronologically, Plumly’s poems slowly de-mature, and lose the very negative capability he worked so diligently to achieve. Case in point: Collected Poems begins with “Spots of Time,” a 13-sonnet sequence, over which Plumly’s father looms large. He’s so hard-working that his “callused” hands are “nearly without finger-prints” and unmarked by “whatever else on earth they’ve ever touched,” just one of many finely wrought images Plumly produces alongside lines that ring like great aphorisms: “if memory is the parent, / remembering’s the argument.” By contrast, we end the book with Plumly’s first major poem, the Faulkneresque “Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me,” which portrays father and son submerged in silence as thick as the ocean, and its terse, clipped lines “I dream we lied under water, / caught in our own sure drift,” close the book on an unexpectedly austere note, far removed from the grandeur that makes so much of Plumly’s later work engrossing, and likely to endure.

Nevertheless, maybe Plumly was right. After all, his last book, Middle Distance, may indeed be his best and should be read first, as he intended. In a collection with no fillers, the 11-page prosimetrum “Travel & Leisure” stands out. Following, as ever, in the footsteps of the Romantics, this work serves as a chronicle of Plumly’s own “Grand Tour” around Europe—to various places in England, Italy, and France. But unlike in Keats’s time, when young aristocrats gallivanted around the continent before sobering up and settling down, Plumly undertakes his journey at the end of his life. This allows the poem to slide between past and present: from his earliest memories in the Ohio farmhouse where he was raised, to the moment he helps his mother die—realizing she can now only experience colors the way Turner painted them: blurry and out-of-focus, but electrically alive. Death haunts “Travel & Leisure,” and it devotes much attention to the women who helped shape Plumly’s life, including the following lines about the poet Deborah Digges, to whom he was married between 1985 and 1993, and who took her own life in 2009:

                                               When 
Deborah jumped, for instance, she 
must have thought that what was under 
her was water willing to love her 
the way she was loved by so many. Suicide is about the imagination. 
It’s a decision based on evidence.

Rita Dove, a student of Plumly’s, once called him the heir to talents like Keats and James Wright, and Collected Poems may well confirm that opinion. He cast a long shadow as a writer and a teacher; his students include poets Liz Countryman, Tyler Mills, and Patrick Phillips, among others. Anyone interested in further investigating that part of his career would be well served by examining the “Stanley Plumly Memorial Digital Archive,” maintained by The Georgia Review, which includes the transcript of a symposium held in Plumly’s honor in 2021, where Patrick Phillips says the following: “The greatest lesson on offer was never something Stan said in workshop, but rather the example of Plumly himself: his deep silences; his oak-tree patience; and his lifelong commitment to poetry as a practice, a calling, a way of making that was inseparable from his way of living.”

Plumly was among the last of his generation of major poets to die, and the number of tributes published since point to his lasting significance. However similar to some of his fellow lyricists, Plumly is a little sui generis, like Jack Gilbert. The pair met just once, in the late 1970s, but the occasion stayed with Plumly, as evidenced by a brief memoir he wrote after Gilbert’s death. “If poetry is one silence speaking to another silence or otherwise communities of spirits,” he writes, “Gilbert’s is somewhere in between. He lived on islands of his own making. White islands in waters crystalline.” He might have been writing about himself, as this Collected Poems, which encases the entirety of that brutal, arborous island, makes plain.

Plumly’s best poems, tangibly inspired by his Quaker roots, are an honest accounting of his experience grappling with our universe’s intangible spirituality, and their value is enriched by his obstinacy to expand the American lyric’s moral and sociohistorical investigation of the nation’s consciousness, a tendency that sharpened the nearer Plumly drew to his death. It was the culmination of a lifelong journey. Trees had begun to teach him that lesson long before he wrote brilliant poems about it, back in his grandfather’s Appalachian baronetcy:

Who will teach the Germans how to scale and trim 
the trees and take them down to the level of stacked 
lumber?—I will, with my five-year old imagination. 
Who will keep them company at meals and recreation?— 
the war is almost over, I have murder in my heart.