Stanley Plumly papers
Collection
0589-LIT
Stanley Plumly (1939-2019) was a poet, professor of English, and director of the creative writing program at University of Maryland.
This collection includes materials related to Plumly's life and career and covers the period 1953 to 2019. It also includes a number of undated materials. The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, titled works, publications, audiovisual materials, photographs, memorabilia, a 2009 Maryland Poet Laureate Award, and other numerous awards.
This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections Reading Room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.
This collection is unprocessed. This means that materials are in the same state we received them and have not been reviewed for content or condition. The collection may need to be screened prior to use. Please contact us before visiting the Special Collections reading room to view this collection.
This collection contains restricted material. Please check the preliminary inventory under the Inventories/Additional Information section for more information.
Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.
Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.
Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the special collections reading room staff.
30.98 Linear Feet (19 Paige record storage boxes, 1 small object storage box (.5 linear feet), 1 oversize flat storage box (1.75 linear feet), 1 half letter-size record storage box (.23 linear feet))
362 Photographs (298 color photographs, 64 black and white photographs)
7 Negatives (Photographs) (7 photographic negatives)
2 Photographic Slides (1 black and white photographic slide, 1 color photographic slide)
3 Videocassettes (3 VHS tapes)
18 Sound Cassettes (18 audio cassette tapes)
6 floppy_disks (6 - 3 1/2 inch floppy disks (4.18 megabytes)) : Microsoft Word Document 97-2003, Microsoft Word Document 6.0/95, WordPerfect for MS-DOS/Windows Document 6.x, Microsoft Word for Macintosh Document 4
7 Sound Discs (6 cds (851.89 megabytes)) : Waveform Audio, MPEG 1/2 Audio Layer 3
1 electronic_discs (1 cd (57.54 megabytes)) : Exchangeable Image File Format (Compressed) 2.21
English
The Stanley Plumly papers cover the period 1953 to 2019 and includes a number of undated materials. The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, titled works, publications, audiovisual materials, photographs, memorabilia, a 2009 Maryland Poet Laureate Award, and other awards.
Stanley Ross Plumly (1939-2019) was a poet, Maryland poet laureate, and distinguished professor at the University of Maryland. He was born May 23, 1939 in Barnesville, Ohio, and spent the first seven years of his life in Winchester, Virginia before moving to Piqua, Ohio. Plumly graduated with a BA from Wilmington College, Ohio in 1961 and received his PhD from Ohio University. He published his first book of poetry in 1970 and taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Columbia University and the University of Houston before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1985.
His collection of poetry, In the Outer Dark (1970), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His last book, Middle Distance (2020), was published posthumously.
In addition to his many collections of poetry, Plumly is also a noted scholar of the English poet John Keats, the Keats circle, and Romanticism, including the painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. His nonfiction prose received widespread acclaim. Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), was named runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Distinguished Biography. The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014) was awarded the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2015. Over the course of his career Plumly also served as editor of the Ohio Review, the Iowa Review, and several other poetry anthologies.
Plumly joined the faculty of University of Maryland in 1985 where he was a professor of English for 34 years. He taught poetry workshops and courses on the Romantic era at the University of Maryland until 2018. He also founded the MFA graduate program in creative writing, which he continued to lead until his death.
Plumly served as Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018, the second longest amount of time the position has been held. He taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference and numerous other workshops throughout his career. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Plumly received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Stanley Plumly died April 11, 2019 at the age of 79.
This collection contains audiovisual materials. Items that cannot be used in the Special Collections reading room or are too fragile for researchers require that a digital copy be made prior to use. If you would like to access these materials, please contact us prior to your visit.
This collection contains born-digital materials. If you would like to access these materials, please contact us prior to your visit as items may require specialized software for access.
This collection was donated to the University of Maryland Libraries by Margaret Plumly, the wife of Stanley Plumly, on September 20, 2021.
This collection has been minimally processed. Aside from some rough groupings of similar material, the collection came to the Libraries in no particular order. Upon receipt, the materials were housed in 29 record storage boxes.
In 2023, Victoria Vera placed correspondence in acid-free folders. Lindsay Oliver created a preliminary inventory. In 2024, Rebecca Lukachinski shifted or relocated some folders to other boxes so that all correspondence would be organized chronologically by year, with the year written in place of folder titles. Lindsay Oliver completed the preliminary inventory. During the inventory process, Lindsay Oliver consolidated boxes into 19 record storage boxes and three (3) additional storage boxes. Electronic media, audiocassettes, and videocassettes were sorted to be physically together in one box and all photographs were moved to one box to facilitate the next steps in minimal processing. Two large photographs were kept with poster size items. Loose materials were placed in acid-free folders and given folder titles in some instances. Restricted items were removed from the original folders and placed in [Restricted] folders.
In 2024, electronic media were separated for transfer of born-digital content. Born-digital materials were received on six (6) 3.5" floppy disks and seven (7) CDs. Amy Wickner copied files from original media to library storage with Grsync. This included one (1) unreadable disk and two (2) duplicate disks. One (1) file suspected to contain malware and duplicate files were discarded. One disk contained 99 highly similar headshots, of which 11 were sampled and retained.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives