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what does the speaker say about the urns ability to tell a tale

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1819 verse form past John Keats

A fine-line drawing of an urn. It is tall, with high scrolled handles. Around the middle is a frieze of figures, of which four can be seen. From left to right, a naked man with a helmet and sword, a dancing woman in a flowing garment, a robed woman carrying a spear and a naked man with a cloak hanging from his shoulder. The drawing is inscribed "By John Keats".

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, start published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819 [i] (see 1820 in poesy).

The poem is one of the "Not bad Odes of 1819", which likewise include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found existing forms in poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and in this collection he presented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem subsequently reading 2 articles past English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Through his awareness of other writings in this field and his first-hand acquaintance with the Elgin Marbles, Keats perceived the idealism and representation of Greek virtues in classical Greek art, and his poem draws upon these insights.

In five stanzas of x lines each, the poet addresses an aboriginal Greek urn, describing and discoursing upon the images depicted on it. In particular he reflects upon two scenes, one in which a lover pursues his beloved, and another where villagers and a priest assemble to perform a cede. The poet concludes that the urn will say to future generations of mankind: "'Beauty is Truth, Truth Dazzler.' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". Critics accept debated whether these lines adequately perfect the conception of the poem. Critics have also focused on the part of the speaker, the power of material objects to inspire, and the paradoxical interrelation between the worldly and the ideal reality in the poem.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was not well received past contemporary critics. Information technology was only by the mid-19th century that it began to be praised, and it is now considered to be one of the greatest odes in the English.[ii] A long debate over the poem's final argument divided 20th-century critics, but most agreed on the beauty of the work, despite sure perceived inadequacies.

Background [edit]

Miniature of Keats in his twenties, a pale sensitive young man with large blue eyes looking up from a book on the table in front of him, with his chin on his left hand with his elbow. He has tousled golden-brown hair parted in the middle, and wears a grey jacket and waistcoat over a shirt with a soft collar and white cravate tied in a loose bow.

Past the bound of 1819, Keats had left his job as dresser, or assistant business firm surgeon, at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, London, to devote himself entirely to the composition of poetry. Living with his friend Charles Brown, the 23-year-old was encumbered with money bug and despaired when his blood brother George sought his fiscal assist. These real-world difficulties may have given Keats pause for idea about a career in poetry, yet he did manage to complete five odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Psyche", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode on Indolence", and "Ode on a Grecian Urn".[three] The poems were transcribed by Brownish, who later provided copies to the publisher Richard Woodhouse. Their exact date of composition is unknown; Keats simply dated "Ode on a Grecian Urn" May 1819, as he did its companion odes. While the five poems display a unity in stanza forms and themes, the unity fails to provide clear evidence of the order in which they were composed.[4]

In the odes of 1819 Keats explores his contemplations about relationships between the soul, eternity, nature, and art. His idea of using classical Greek art as a metaphor originated in his reading of Haydon's Examiner articles of 2 May and 9 May 1819. In the get-go article, Haydon described Greek sacrifice and worship, and in the 2nd commodity, he contrasted the creative styles of Raphael and Michelangelo in conjunction with a discussion of medieval sculptures. Keats also had access to prints of Greek urns at Haydon'southward office,[5] and he traced an engraving of the "Sosibios Vase", a Neo-Attic marble volute krater, signed by Sosibios, in The Louvre,[6] which he found in Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae.[vii] [viii]

Keats's inspiration for the topic was not limited to Haydon, just embraced many contemporary sources.[9] He may have recalled his experience with the Elgin Marbles[10] and their influence on his sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles".[11] Keats was also exposed to the Townley, Borghese, and Holland Business firm vases and to the classical handling of subjects in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that classical Greek fine art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues. Although he was influenced past examples of existing Greek vases, in the verse form he attempted to describe an ideal artistic type, rather than a specific original vase.[12]

Although "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was completed in May 1819, its first press came in Jan 1820 when it was published with "Ode to a Nightingale" in the Register of Fine Fine art, an art mag that promoted views on art similar to those Keats held.[13] Following the initial publication, the Examiner published Keats's ode together with Haydon's two previously published manufactures.[14] Keats as well included the poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.[fifteen]

Structure [edit]

In 1819, Keats had attempted to write sonnets, simply constitute that the form did not satisfy his purpose considering the pattern of rhyme worked confronting the tone that he wished to accomplish. When he turned to the ode course, he found that the standard Pindaric grade used by poets such as John Dryden was inadequate for properly discussing philosophy.[xvi] Keats adult his own type of ode in "Ode to Psyche", which preceded "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and other odes he wrote in 1819. Keats's creation established a new poetic tone that accorded with his aesthetic ideas about poesy. He further altered this new form in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" past calculation a secondary vocalism within the ode, creating a dialogue between two subjects.[17] The technique of the poem is ekphrasis, the poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in words. Keats broke from the traditional use of ekphrasis found in Theocritus's Idyll, a classical poem that describes a pattern on the sides of a cup. While Theocritus describes both move found in a stationary artwork and underlying motives of characters, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" replaces actions with a series of questions and focuses only on external attributes of the characters.[18]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is organized into ten-line stanzas, start with an ABAB rhyme scheme and ending with a Miltonic sestet (1st and 5th stanzas CDEDCE, 2d stanza CDECED, and 3rd and 4th stanzas CDECDE). The aforementioned overall blueprint is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale" (though their sestet rhyme schemes vary), which makes the poems unified in structure equally well as theme.[four] The word "ode" itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung". While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the form past Keats's time had undergone plenty transformation that it represented a mode rather than a ready method for writing a certain blazon of lyric poetry. Keats'southward odes seek to find a "classical residual" between 2 extremes, and in the structure of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and the asymmetry of Romantic verse. The use of the ABAB structure in the beginning lines of each stanza represents a clear example of structure found in classical literature, and the remaining six lines appear to suspension free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes.[19]

Keats'south metre reflects a conscious development in his poetic style. The verse form contains only a single instance of medial inversion (the reversal of an iamb in the middle of a line), which was common in his earlier works. Nevertheless, Keats incorporates spondees in 37 of the 250 metrical feet. Caesurae are never placed before the fourth syllable in a line. The word option represents a shift from Keats'south early reliance on Latinate polysyllabic words to shorter, Germanic words. In the second stanza, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which emphasizes words containing the letters "p", "b", and "v", uses syzygy, the repetition of a consonantal sound. The poem incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, which is institute in very few English poems. Within "Ode on a Grecian Urn", an example of this pattern can be found in line xiii ("Non to the sensual ear, just, more endear'd") where the "e" of "sensual" connects with the "e" of "endear'd" and the "ea" of "ear" connects with the "ea" of "endear'd".[20]

Poem [edit]

Manuscript in George Keats's hand titled "Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819." It is a fair copy in pen and ink of the first two verses of the poem. The writing is highly legible, tall and elegant, with well-formed letters and a marked slope to the right. The capital letters are distinctive and artistically formed. Even-numbered lines are indented with lines 7 and 10 are further indented. A scallopy line is drawn beneath the heading and between the verses.

Kickoff known copy of Ode on a Grecian Urn, transcribed by George Keats in 1820

The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn past describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.[21] The narrator addresses the urn by maxim:

Chiliad nonetheless unravish'd bride of quietness,
M foster-kid of silence and slow time, (lines 1–2)[22]

The urn is a "foster-child of silence and tiresome time" because information technology was created from stone and fabricated by the hand of an artist who did not communicate through words. As rock, time has piddling event on it and ageing is such a boring process that it tin can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this power the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:[23]

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leafage-fring'd fable haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 3–10)[22]

The questions presented in these lines are also ambiguous to permit the reader to empathise what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed: at that place is a pursuit with a strong sexual component.[24] The tune accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[25]

Heard melodies are sweet, simply those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more than endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–fourteen)[22]

There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a audio is desired past the soul. In that location is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[25]

        Bold Lover, never, never canst thou osculation,
Though winning about the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though yard hast not thy bliss,
For always wilt thou beloved, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)[22]

In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever agree its leaves and will non "bid the Jump farewell". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the 10 lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:[25]

        For ever panting, and for e'er young;
All animate human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)[22]

Renaissance painting depicting the sacrifice at Lystra. In an ancient Greek townscape, a cow is brought before a small altar, and held by a kneeling man with her head down while another raises an axe to kill her. A group of people look with worshipful gestures towards two men who stand on the steps behind the altar. One of the men turns aside and rends his clothes, while the other speaks to the people. A crutch lies abandoned in the foreground and a statue of Hermes is at the end of the square.

Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra

A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.[26] To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.[26] The quaternary stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Cede to Apollo, and Raphael'south The Sacrifice at Lystra [27] [A one]

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what greenish chantry, O mysterious priest,
Atomic number 82'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town past river or body of water shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, petty town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and non a soul to tell
Why thou fine art desolate, can e'er return. (lines 31–40)[22]

All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the balance. The altar and town exist as part of a earth outside art, and the verse form challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no ane who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real. The terminal stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:[28]

O Cranium shape! Fair mental attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
1000, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! (lines 41–45)[22]

The audition is limited in its ability to comprehend the eternal scene, simply the silent urn is withal able to speak to them. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and information technology is able to assist mankind. The poem concludes with the urn's message:[29]

    When old historic period shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all
Ye know on globe, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–fifty)[22]

Themes [edit]

A Romantic painting of Keats sitting near a wood on elevated land. It is evening and the full moon appears above the wood while fading daylight illuminates a distant landscape. Keats appears to turn suddenly from the book he has been reading, towards the trees where a nightingale is silhouetted against the moon.

Keats, Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn

Like many of Keats's odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" discusses art and art's audition. He relied on depictions of natural music in earlier poems, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" entreatment to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual. Keats reverses this when describing an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to focus on representational art. He previously used the image of an urn in "Ode on Indolence", depicting one with 3 figures representing Love, Ambition and Poetry. Of these 3, Beloved and Poetry are integrated into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with an accent on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth". The images of the urn described within the poem are intended every bit obvious depictions of common activities: an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite. The figures are supposed to be beautiful, and the urn itself is supposed to be realistic.[30] Although the poem does non include the subjective interest of the narrator, the clarification of the urn within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images.[31] The narrator interacts with the urn in a manner like to how a critic would reply to the poem, which creates ambiguity in the verse form's concluding lines: "'Beauty is truth, truth dazzler,' – that is all / Ye know on world, and all ye demand to know." The lack of a definite voice of the urn causes the reader to question who is actually speaking these words, to whom they are speaking, and what is meant by the words, which encourages the reader to collaborate with the poem in an interrogative fashion similar the narrator.[32]

As a symbol, an urn cannot completely represent verse, merely it does serve as ane component in describing the human relationship between art and humanity.[33] The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is separated from humanity and does not accept human concerns. In dissimilarity, being a slice of art, the urn requires an audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to interact with humanity, to put along a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. The images on the urn provoke the narrator to inquire questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate. This interaction and use of the imagination is role of a greater tradition chosen ut pictura poesis – the contemplation of fine art past a poet – which serves as a meditation upon fine art itself.[34] In this meditation, the narrator dwells on the aesthetic and mimetic features of art. The get-go of the poem posits that the office of art is to describe a specific story about those with whom the audition is unfamiliar, and the narrator wishes to know the identity of the figures in a manner like to "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode to Psyche". The figures on the urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" lack identities, only the first section ends with the narrator believing that if he knew the story, he would know their names. The 2nd section of the verse form, describing the piper and the lovers, meditates on the possibility that the role of art is not to describe specifics but universal characters, which falls under the term "Truth". The three figures would represent how Honey, Beauty, and Fine art are unified together in an idealised world where art represents the feelings of the audience. The audience is not supposed to question the events but instead to rejoice in the happy aspects of the scene in a mode that reverses the claims nearly art in "Ode to a Nightingale". Similarly, the response of the narrator to the cede is not compatible with the response of the narrator to the lovers.[35]

The two contradictory responses found in the first and second scenes of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inadequate for completely describing art, because Keats believed that art should not provide history or ethics. Instead, both are replaced with a philosophical tone that dominates the meditation on art. The sensual aspects are replaced with an accent on the spiritual aspects, and the last scene describes a world independent unto itself. The human relationship betwixt the audition with the world is for benefiting or educating, but simply to emphatically connect to the scene. In the scene, the narrator contemplates where the boundaries of art lie and how much an artist tin represent on an urn. The questions the narrator asks reveal a yearning to empathise the scene, only the urn is likewise limited to allow such answers. Furthermore, the narrator is able to visualise more what actually exists on the urn. This conclusion on art is both satisfying, in that information technology allows the audition to actually connect with the art, and alienating, every bit it does not provide the audition the benefit of instruction or narcissistic fulfilment.[36] Besides the contradictions between the various desires within the poem, at that place are other paradoxes that sally equally the narrator compares his world with that of the figures on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a "bride of quietness", which serves to dissimilarity the urn with the structure of the ode, a type of poem originally intended to be sung. Another paradox arises when the narrator describes immortals on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.[37]

In terms of the actual figures upon the urn, the image of the lovers depicts the relationship of passion and beauty with fine art. In "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on Melancholy", Keats describes how beauty is temporary. However, the figures of the urn are able to always enjoy their beauty and passion because of their creative permanence.[38] The urn's description as a helpmate invokes a possibility of consummation, which is symbolic of the urn's demand for an audience. Charles Patterson, in a 1954 essay, explains that "Information technology is erroneous to assume that hither Keats is merely disparaging the helpmate of flesh wed to man and glorifying the bride of marble wednesday to quietness. He could accept achieved that simple effect more deftly with another image than the richly ambivalent unravished bride, which conveys ... a hint of disparagement: Information technology is natural for brides to be possessed physically ... it is unnatural for them not to be."[39] John Jones, in his 1969 analysis, emphasises this sexual dimension within the verse form by comparing the relationship between "the Eve Adam dreamed of and who was there when he woke up" and the "bridal urn" of "Ode on a Grecian Urn".[40] Helen Vendler expands on the thought, in her 1983 assay of Keats'due south odes, when she claimed "the circuitous mind writing the Urn connects stillness and quietness to ravishment and a bride".[41] In the second stanza, Keats "voices the generating motive of the verse form – the necessary cocky-exhaustion and cocky-perpetuation of sexual appetite."[42] To Vendler, want and longing could be the source of creative creativity, but the urn contains two contradicting expressions of sexuality: a lover chasing afterward a honey and a lover with his beloved. This contradiction reveals Keats's conventionalities that such love in general was unattainable and that "The true opponent to the urn-experience of love is not satisfaction but extinction."[43]

Critical response [edit]

The offset response to the verse form came in an bearding review in the July 1820 Monthly Review, which claimed, "Mr Keats displays no cracking nicety in his selection of images. According to the tenets of that school of poetry to which he belongs, he thinks that whatsoever matter or object in nature is a fit material on which the poet may work ... Can there be a more than pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?"[44] Another bearding review followed in the 29 July 1820 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review that quoted the verse form with a note that said that "Among the small poems, many of which possess considerable merit, the following appears to be the best".[45] Josiah Conder, in a September 1820 Eclectic Review, argues that:

Mr Keats, seemingly, can think or write of scarcely any thing else than the 'happy pieties' of Paganism. A Grecian Urn throws him into an ecstasy: its 'silent form,' he says, 'doth tease us out of idea as doth Eternity,'—a very happy description of the bewildering effect which such subjects have at to the lowest degree had upon his own mind; and his fancy having thus got the amend of his reason, we are the less surprised at the oracle which the Urn is made to utter:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know.—Just till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.[46]

George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the verse form among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works 'rise like an exhalation.' His language has been formed on a false organization; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select. He seems to take been balky to all speculative idea, and his but creed, nosotros fright, was expressed in the words— Dazzler is truth,—truth dazzler".[47] The 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn'; information technology breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal dazzler and eternal placidity."[48] During the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold claimed that the passage describing the footling boondocks "is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is equanimous with the heart on the object, a radiancy and light clearness beingness added."[49]

'Dazzler is truth' debate [edit]

The 20th century marked the beginning of a critical dispute over the last lines of the poem and their human relationship to the beauty of the whole work. Poet laureate Robert Bridges sparked the debate when he argued:

The idea equally enounced in the first stanza is the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfect; and this is true and beautiful; but its amplification in the verse form is unprogressive, monotonous, and scattered ... which gives an effect of poverty in spite of the beauty. The last stanza enters stumbling upon a pun, but its final lines are very fine, and make a sort of recovery with their forcible directness.[50]

Bridges believed that the terminal lines redeemed an otherwise bad poem. Arthur Quiller-Couch responded with a opposite view and claimed that the lines were "a vague ascertainment – to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in 1 so young and agog."[50] The contend expanded when I. A. Richards, an English literary critic who analysed Keats'due south poems in 1929, relied on the concluding lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to discuss "pseudo-statements" in verse:

On the one hand at that place are very many people who, if they read any poetry at all, try to take all its statements seriously – and observe them featherbrained ... This may seem an absurd mistake just, alas! it is none the less mutual. On the other hand there are those who succeed likewise well, who swallow 'Dazzler is truth, truth beauty ...,' as the quintessence of an aesthetic philosophy, not every bit the expression of a sure blend of feelings, and proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naivety.[51]

Poet and critic T. S. Eliot, in his 1929 "Dante" essay, responded to Richards:

I am at outset inclined to agree ... But on re-reading the whole Ode, this line strikes me equally a serious blotch on a beautiful poem, and the reason must exist either that I fail to understand it, or that information technology is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something past it, however remote his truth and his dazzler may take been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would accept repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement ... The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or peradventure the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.[52]

In 1930, John Middleton Murry gave a history of these responses "to prove the astonishing diversity of opinion which exists at this day concerning the culmination of a poem whose dazzler has been acknowledged for many years. Whether such another crusade, and such another example, of critical diversity exists, I cannot say; if it does, it is unknown to me. My ain opinion concerning the value of those 2 lines in the context of the poem itself is non very dissimilar from Mr. Eliot's."[53]

Cleanth Brooks defended the lines from critics in 1947 and argued:

We shall not feel that the generalization, unqualified and to be taken literally, is meant to march out of its context to compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world. 'Dazzler is truth, truth beauty' has precisely the same status, and the same justification every bit Shakespeare'south 'Ripeness is all.' Information technology is a spoken language 'in character' and supported past a dramatic context. To conclude thus may seem to weight the principle of dramatic propriety with more than it can bear. This would not exist fair to the complexity of the problem of truth in art nor off-white to Keats's niggling parable. Granted; and even so the principle of dramatic propriety may accept us further than would start announced. Respect for it may at least insure our dealing with the trouble of truth at the level on which it is really relevant to literature.[54]

M. H. Abrams responded to Brooks's view in 1957:

I entirely hold, then, with Professor Brooks in his explication of the Ode, that 'Dazzler is truth' ... is to exist considered equally a speech 'in grapheme' and 'dramatically advisable' to the Urn. I am uneasy, all the same, nearly his terminal reference to 'the world-view ...' For the poem as a whole is as an utterance by a dramatically presented speaker, and none of its statements is proffered for our endorsement as a philosophical generalization of unlimited scope. They are all, therefore, to be apprehended as histrionic elements which are 'in character' and 'dramatically appropriate,' for their inherent interest as stages in the development of an artistically ordered ... feel of a apparent man.[55]

Earl Wasserman, in 1953, continued the give-and-take over the concluding lines and claimed, "the more we tug at the final lines of the ode, the more the noose of their significant strangles our comprehension of the verse form ... The aphorism is all the more fallacious because information technology appears near the finish of the poem, for its evidently climactic position has generally led to the assumption that it is the abstract summation of the poem ... But the ode is non an abstract statement or an excursion into philosophy. It is a poem near things".[56]

Walter Evert, discussing the debate in 1965, justified the final lines of the poem to declare "The poem, and then, accepts the urn for the immediate meditative imaginative pleasure that it tin give, only information technology firmly defines the limits of artistic truth. In this it is wholly consistent with all the great verse of Keats's concluding creative period."[57] Hugh Kenner, in 1971, explained that Keats "interrogates an urn, and answers for information technology, and its last respond, most Dazzler and Truth, may seem almost intolerably enigmatic".[58] To Kenner, the problem with Keats'due south Dazzler and Truth statement arises out of the reader's disability to distinguish between the poet, his reflections on the urn, and any possible statement made by the urn. He concluded that Keats fails to provide his narrator with enough label to exist able to speak for the urn.[58] Charles Rzepka, in 1986, offered his view on the matter: "The truth-dazzler equation at the finish of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' offers solace but is finally no more disarming than the experience it describes is durable."[59] Rick Rylance picked upward the contend again in 1990 and explained that the true meaning of the concluding lines cannot be discerned but by studying the language. This posed a problem for the New Critics, who were decumbent to closely reading a poem'due south text.[60]

Afterwards responses [edit]

Not every 20th-century critic opined primarily on the quality of the final lines when discussing the success or failure of the poem; Sidney Colvin, in 1920, explained that "while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger endeavour and produce a truthful masterpiece in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn."[61] In his 1926 assay, H. West. Garrod felt that the stop of the poem did not match with the residual of the poem: "Possibly the quaternary stanza is more than beautiful than any of the others—and more true. The trouble is that information technology is a little too true. Truth to his main theme has taken Keats rather further than he meant to go ... This pure cold art makes, in fact, a less appeal to Keats than the Ode as a whole would pretend; and when, in the lines that follow these lines, he indulges the jarring apostrophe 'Cold Pastoral' [...] he has said more than he meant—or wished to hateful."[62] In 1933, One thousand. R. Ridley described the poem as a "tense ethereal beauty" with a "bear on of didacticism that weakens the urgency" of the statements.[63] Douglas Bush, following in 1937, emphasized the Greek aspects of the poem and stated, "as in the Ode to Maia, the concrete details are suffused with a rich nostalgia. The hard edges of classical Greek writing are softened by the enveloping emotion and proposition. In his classical moments Keats is a sculptor whose marble becomes mankind."[64]

In 1954, Charles Patterson defended the verse form and claimed, "The meaningfulness and range of the verse form, along with its controlled execution and powerfully suggestive imagery, entitle information technology to a high identify among Keats's peachy odes. It lacks the even finish and farthermost perfection of To Autumn only is much superior in these qualities to the Ode to a Nightingale despite the magic passages in the latter and the similarities of over-all construction. In fact, the Ode on a Grecian Urn may deserve to rank offset in the grouping if viewed in something approaching its true complication and human wisdom."[65] Walter Jackson Bate argued in 1962 that "the Grecian Urn possesses a quiet and constrained composure hardly equaled past the other odes of this month and perhaps even unsurpassed by the ode To Autumn of the following September ... in that location is a severe tranquillity about the Ode on a Grecian Urn; it is both 'interwoven' and 'complete'; and inside its tensely braced stanzas is a potential energy momentarily stilled and imprisoned."[66] In 1964, literary critic David Perkins claimed in his essay "The Ode on a Nightingale" that the symbol of the urn "may maybe not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry ... but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human being reactions".[33]

F. Due west. Bateson emphasized in 1966 the verse form'south ability to capture truth: "The Ode to a Nightingale had ended with the explicit admission that the 'fancy' is a 'crook,' and the Grecian Urn concludes with a similar repudiation. But this time it is a positive instead of a negative determination. There is no escape from the 'woe' that 'shall this generation waste,' but the action of fourth dimension can exist confronted and seen in its proper proportions. To enable its readers to practise this is the special part of poesy."[67] Ronald Sharp followed in 1979 with a merits that the theme of "the relationship between life and art ... receives its about famous, and its near enigmatic and controversial, treatment" within the verse form.[68] In 1983, Vendler praised many of the passages within the poem only argued that the verse form was unable to fully correspond what Keats wanted: "The simple movement of entrance and exit, even in its triple repetition in the Urn, is but not structurally complex plenty to exist adequate, as a representational form, to what we know of aesthetic experience – or indeed to human experience more often than not."[69] Later on in 1989, Daniel Watkins claimed the poem as "one of [Keats's] near beautiful and problematic works."[70]

Andrew Bennett, in 1994, discussed the verse form's effectiveness: "What is important and compelling in this poem is not so much what happens on the urn or in the verse form, simply the way that a response to an artwork both figures and prefigures its own critical response".[71] In 1999, Andrew Motion claimed that the poem "tells a story that cannot exist developed. Celebrating the transcendent powers of art, information technology creates a sense of imminence, but also registers a feeling of frustration."[vii] Ayumi Mizukoshi, in 2001, argued that early audiences did not support "Ode to Psyche" considering information technology "turned out to be likewise reflexive and internalised to be enjoyed every bit a mythological picture. For the same reason, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' drew neither attention nor adoration. Although the poet is gazing round the surface of the urn in each stanza, the poem cannot readily be consumed as a series of 'idylls'."[72]

Notes [edit]

  1. ^ The Raphael is i of the Raphael Cartoons then at Hampton Court Palace. The Claude is at present usually called Landscape with the Father of Psyche sacrificing to Apollo, and is now at Anglesey Abbey. It was one of the pair of "Altieri Claudes", amid the most famous and expensive paintings of the twenty-four hour period. Run into Reitlinger, Gerald; The Economic science of Taste, Vol I: The Ascension and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960, Barrie and Rockliffe, London, 1961, and Fine art and Money Archived July 7, 2011, at the Wayback Motorcar, past Robert Hughes. Image of the Raphael, and prototype of the Claude Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine

References [edit]

  1. ^ "Annals of the fine arts. v.4 1819". HathiTrust . Retrieved 2019-08-31 .
  2. ^ Sheats 2001 p. 86
  3. ^ Bate 1963 pp. 487–527
  4. ^ a b Gittings 1968 p. 311
  5. ^ Gittings 1968 pp. 305–319
  6. ^ Louvre Museum: Volute krater "Sosibios" accessed 5 Jan 2017.
  7. ^ a b Motion 1999 p. 391
  8. ^ Blunden 1967 p. 103
  9. ^ Magunson 1998 p. 208
  10. ^ Gittings 1968 p. 319
  11. ^ Gumpert 1999
  12. ^ Motion 1999 pp. 390–391
  13. ^ Motion 1999 p. 390
  14. ^ MacGillivray 1938 pp. 465–466
  15. ^ Matthews 1971 pp. 149, 159, 162
  16. ^ Gittings 1968 pp. 310–311
  17. ^ Bate 1963 pp. 498–500
  18. ^ Kelley 2001 pp. 172–173
  19. ^ Swanson 1962 pp. 302–305
  20. ^ Bate 1962 pp. 133–135, 137–140, 58–lx
  21. ^ Sheley 2007
  22. ^ a b c d e f g h Keats 1905 pp. 194-195
  23. ^ Bloom 1993 p. 416
  24. ^ Flower 1993 pp. 416–417
  25. ^ a b c Flower 1993 p. 417
  26. ^ a b Bloom 1993 p. 418
  27. ^ Bush 1959 p. 349
  28. ^ Flower 1993 pp. 418–419
  29. ^ Flower 1993 p. 419
  30. ^ Vendler 1983 pp. 116–117
  31. ^ Bate 1963 pp. 510–511
  32. ^ Bennett 1994 pp. 128–134
  33. ^ a b Perkins 1964 p. 103
  34. ^ Bate 1963 pp. 511–512
  35. ^ Vendler 1983 pp. 118–120
  36. ^ Vendler 1983 pp. 120–123
  37. ^ Brooks 1947 pp. 151–167
  38. ^ Wigod 1968 p. 59
  39. ^ Patterson 1968 pp. 49–50
  40. ^ Jones 1969 p. 176
  41. ^ Vendler 1983 p. 140
  42. ^ Vendler 1983 p. 141
  43. ^ Vendler 1983 pp. 141–142
  44. ^ Matthews 1971 qtd. p. 162
  45. ^ Matthews 1971 qtd. pp. 163–164
  46. ^ Matthews 1971 qtd. p. 237
  47. ^ Matthews 1971 qtd. p. 306
  48. ^ Matthews 1971 qtd. p. 367
  49. ^ Arnold 1962 p. 378
  50. ^ a b Murry 1955 qtd p. 210
  51. ^ Richards 1929 pp. 186–187
  52. ^ Eliot 1932 pp. 230–231
  53. ^ Murry 1955 p. 212
  54. ^ Brooks 1947 p. 165
  55. ^ Abrams 1968 p. 111
  56. ^ Wasserman 1967 pp. 13–14
  57. ^ Evert 1965 p. 319
  58. ^ a b Kenner 1971 p. 26
  59. ^ Rzepka 1986 p. 177
  60. ^ Rylance 1990 pp. 730–733
  61. ^ Colvin 1920 pp. 415–416
  62. ^ Patterson 1968 qtd. pp. 48–49
  63. ^ Ridley 1933 p. 281
  64. ^ Bush 1937 p. 109
  65. ^ Patterson 1968 p. 57
  66. ^ Bate 1962 pp. 140–141
  67. ^ Bateson 1968 p. 108
  68. ^ Sharp 1979 p. 151
  69. ^ Vendler 1983 p. 152
  70. ^ Watkins 1989 p. 105
  71. ^ Bennet 1994 p. 134
  72. ^ Mizukoshi 2001 p. 170

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External links [edit]

  • An omnibus collection of Keats' verse at Standard Ebooks
  • Media related to Sosibios vase at Wikimedia Commons
  • Ode on a Grecian Urn – Annotated text and assay aligned to Common Cadre Standards

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_a_Grecian_Urn

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