The poet Stanley Plumly passed away on April 11, 2019, at his home in Frederick, Maryland, from complications from multiple myeloma. He was the author of many collections of poetry—including Orphan Hours, Against Sunset, and Old Heart, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award—as well as several works of nonfiction, including Posthumous Keats and An Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb, which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

In addition to the aforementioned awards and accolades, Plumly received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was also Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2018. In 1985, he founded the graduate creative writing program at the University of Maryland, where he had been teaching.

“Stanley is one of the most important, admired, and influential teachers of his generation,” the University of Maryland Department of English wrote in a statement. “He often gave this simple, challenging, encouraging, and emphatic piece of advice: ‘just do the work’. Those who followed his advice include former US Poets Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, as well as MacArthur and many Guggenheim foundation fellows.”

At the time of his death, he had recently completed a new collection of poems titled Middle Distance and was planning a collected volume of poetry and a critical study on the pastoral tradition. He is survived by his wife, stepdaughters, and sister.

Image Credit: Kevin Clark/The Washington Post