The Immortal Evening
A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb
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- US$12.99
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- US$12.99
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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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
