Warm-Up Have you ever been happy enough that you felt you could live in that moment forever?
Learning Objectives Analyze the ambiguity and nuance within a text through specific literary devices such as paradox. How does art shape the world around us?
Ode To A Grecian Urn By John Keats
Who is John Keats? Keats witnesses human suffering as a “dresser"at Guy Hospital and his own personal losses and deaths in family. Develops a somber attitude towards life and art. He died at the age of 25, had only 54 poems published out of 150 poems that he wrote. His poetry is characterized by vivid imagery especially in the odes.
Understanding His Poetry Major themes in his works are: the inevitability of death, contemplation of beauty, Hellenism, getting lost in the ideal world, his negative capability, vivid imagery, and permanence of art. He had plans of poetic achievement, but his dream was always interrupted by thoughts of approaching death. In many of his poems the speaker leaves the real world to explore a mythical or aesthetic realm and returns at the end with better understanding.
Negative Capability The poet gives up his personal identity to focus on object being described, so the object becomes symbolic of intense emotions and only that emotion is important. Keats rejected the artist’s attempt to analyze, rationalize, or categorize the world – to pass judgments.
How We Create Poetry According To Keats 1.Imagination communicates an intense emotion. 2.The poet gives up personal identity to focus on the object being described. 3.As a result, the object becomes symbolic of these intense emotions. 4.And all other matters not important to this emotion are sidelined. 5.The poem’s beauty/truth are combination of poetic emotion and perceived object. 6.The poem thus is a subjective truth.
The Ode For Keats the urn in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is an object that speaks a truth and a beauty, but that truth and beauty are understood by the subjective ideal of the artist. The urn’s message of beauty and truth is open-ended and mysterious. The ode contains the most discussed two lines of all of Keats’ poetry – “Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
The Content The poem is about an object of art and the poem itself is art. The poem is based on a series of paradoxes: the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn. the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent. participation versus observation. life versus art.
The Last Two Lines As you can see, there is much ambiguity. Who is speaking, the urn or the poet, or the persona? Who is being addressed in these last lines? What is meant by these last lines – that beauty is painful or a more philosophical statement: in the relation of the ideal to the actual? Is the urn rejected at the end? Is art--can art ever be--a substitute for real life?
Think About It… Look at the type of poem this is – why is it significant in terms of Romanticism? Think about why the poem is about a Grecian Urn – what is its significance?