Plumly grew up on a family farm in Ohio and Virginia, and taught at Wilmington College, where he co-founded The Ohio Review, the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Houston, Breadloaf Writers Conference, and at the University of Maryland, where he served as director of the creative writing program. He taught at UofM from 2009 until just before his death.
Plumly is the author of thirteen books of poems, including the posthumous Collected Poems (2025), Old Heart (2009, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), In the Outer Dark (1970, winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award), and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He co-edited The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999, with Michael Collier), and published four books of nonfiction, including Posthumous Keats (2008), and Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018). Among other honors, Plumly was Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland, won the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.