Lessons from a Grecian Urn
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Lessons from a Grecian Urn
An object is perfect, when everything manifold in it accords with the unity of its concept; it is beautiful, when its perfection appears as nature. The beauty increases, when the perfection becomes more complex and the nature suffers nothing thereby; for the task of freedom becomes more difficult with the increasing number of compounds and its fortunate resolution, therefore, even more astonishing.
—Friedrich Schiller’s “Kallias, or on the Beautiful”
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most celebrated and well-known poems of the English language, and rightly so. However, it is arguably also one of the least understood.
Unfortunately, the advent of twentieth century Modernism cast a cloud of obscurity over many works in the classical tradition. The classical tradition is typified by Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the works of the ancient Greeks like Plato, Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe et al.
In the twentieth century, many of the most compelling aspects and ironies of works like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have been treated in a manner which Keats—and those he most identified with as a mature artist—would not recognize. In the terms of twentieth century “Modernism” thinking, criticism and appreciation for a timeless piece of art like Keats’ ode became relegated to Modernist interpretations, including ideas like New Criticism’s “close reading.” Discussion of poetics became largely confined to an analysis of the ode’s “enigmatic” qualities, its novel word-choice, language and imagery—what we refer to as poetic “craft.”
Twentieth century “New Criticism” was outlined by writers such as John Crow Ransom and his related circles around The Fugitive literary magazine, based out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. However, “New Criticism” was not “new” in that it was rooted in the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound (Eliot’s one time pro-Mussolini fascism mentor), W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats et al. “New Criticism” was the outgrowth of a Modernist outlook spread and championed by the leading Modernist poets of Europe and the Americas.
In the manual, Twentieth Century Literary Theory—authored by K.M. Newton
—the advent of New Criticism was described in the following manner:Though the New Criticism had its origins in Britain in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, the theory of I. A. Richards and the practice of William Empson, its most powerful impact has been in America. John Crowe Ransom, who published a book entitled The New Criticism in 1941, was the leading American influence and he acknowledged a debt to Eliot and Richards.
K.M. Newton continues:
The fundamental aim of American New Criticism was to create a critical alternative to impressionism and historical scholarship […] It advocated ‘intrinsic’ criticism – an impersonal concern for the literary work as an independent object- and opposed ‘extrinsic’ critical approaches, which concerned themselves with such matters as authorial intention, historical, moral or political considerations, and audience response.
From the lens of “New Criticism” and related “Modernist” schools of thought, compelling and thought provoking ironies were reduced to a discussion of novel poetic effects, tropes and literary devices. Discussion was centered not on the quality or value of a poetical idea per se, and the language and imagery used by the poet to convey this idea by way of some new metaphorical expression or narrative, instead discussion was confined to a strict analysis of poetic craft—as if the relationship between artistic craft and a poem’s underlying philosophy or worldview were a different question; as if one could separate the traces of ink left on the page by the poet’s pen from the poet’s thoughts themselves.
A great poem must be finely crafted, but it must also be much more: a poem is a reflection of the universe inhabited by the poet. To restrict discussion of a poem to the question of craft alone is to ignore—wittingly or unwittingly—the investigation of what universe the poet places before us, the universe he/she inhabits and what this universe means for humanity generally. To ignore such questions is to abandon philosophy altogether—an attempt to separate Beauty from Truth whose wedding is the ultimate aim of great art. Indeed, artists are the great consecrators of the sacred relationship shared between Truth and Beauty.
Under the guise of “New Criticism,” the great bards of the past would now be paid lip service not on account of the beauty or truthfulness of their ideas in respect to “profound conceptions concerning man and nature”— as Shelley once described the poet’s great task
— they would be admired as skilled craftsmen, skilled in their ability to paint our imaginations with beautiful images, regardless of Truth. Thus, a skilled craftsman could just as easily paint the portrait of a Jesus-loving Satanist, or a love-making sadist and garner just as much praise and attention on account of their fine craft. In a word: it did not matter what poets said, all that mattered was how they said it.This may seem like a harmless approach; however, with any fundamental discussion of ideas stripped from the concept of poetry, it is not hard to imagine how art lost its moral tiller and its sense of direction in regards to the question of human nature, or how we might situate such questions in respect to humankind and its relationship to the universe as a whole. The idea of “New Criticism” defined a kind of amoral aesthetic that poisoned the spirit of generations and zapped the vitality out of many souls who would have otherwise been excited about the prospect of discovering something true and meaningful in the universe, that they too could have a part to play in its great unfolding drama.
Rather than craft beautiful tragedies that could inspire one to greater ideas of humankind and its future, art itself became one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century—a tragedy whose essence was the condemnation of poetry and literature to an abyss of nihilism, wanton pedantry and frantic hostility to any idea of Truth beyond the five senses.
Society became saturated with a nihilism whose bitter effect on our culture remains palpable to this day. The view of human beings as endowed with a divine spark of creativity—a spark which every individual should be afforded a meaningful opportunity to develop—became increasingly rare.
In the twentieth century, the idea of “meaning” and the importance of meaning became anathema to Modernism’s general aesthetic. As a result, a sense of meaning was lost not only in literature, but in society as a whole.
While many today decry how Western society’s laws are being fundamentally rewritten to fit the latest political agenda and culture narrative—however divorced from Truth—these latest aberrations ultimately have their roots in the earlier twentieth century perversions beginning with taste and aesthetics i.e. the domain of the imagination.
From the world of cinema (which captured the imagination of entire generations) to the plastic arts displayed across museums and bustling urban city squares, all facets of the human imagination were led into new unprecedented and questionable expressions. And this is the great truth of art—its power—that it is a fundamental expression of our culture, our view of the world and how we relate to and think about our relationship to the universe as a whole.
From the salons of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to the Ku Klux Clan family-man John Crow Ransom and his Fugitives magazine, The Paris Review, Eliot’s Criterion and many other outlets, the Modernist ideal proliferated across the West under various names including—but not exclusive to—Modernism, Cubism, Imagism, Post Modernism, Formalism, Post-Humanism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Deconstructionism, and Contemporary thinking. While these different schools may have had varying and apparent degrees of separation, one might imagine the example of a recipe which has a definite set of ingredients, but for which an endless variation on the same essential recipe exists.
Chapter I: What is Modernism?
“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”
Like the scientist attempting to observe an electron directly, but refusing to acknowledge the fact that their very act of observation has itself an effect on the particle being observed, so too are we of the opinion that only if philosophy and ideas are restored to their rightful place in a discussion of art and aesthetics can poems like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” be seen for what they are. The same applies to any work of timeless Beauty.
As all progress in human history has been achieved as a result of humanity’s learning from and honoring its greatest traditions, as well as eschewing its worst; from recognizing mankind’s greatest failures to embracing its greatest triumphs and using such knowledge as the foundation for new bold and insightful acts of creation, so too should a clear understanding of the greatest traditions of our past inform the foundation upon which a new viable future for twenty-first century timeless art is built.
However, none other than T.S. Eliot—one of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century—remarked that he thought the closing lines of Keats’ ode, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” were a “blemish” on the poem:
But on re-reading the whole ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement … The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.
– T.S. Eliot’s “Essay on Dante”
Eliot was a very educated and sophisticated intellectual, yet he was not the only twentieth century critic to have been befuddled by Keats’ famous lines. The opinion expressed by Eliot is symptomatic of the outlook associated with twentieth century thought and aesthetics—an outlook typified by “New Criticism.”
In reality, a poet’s view of the world he/she inhabits and the associated view of human nature cannot be separated. Artistic expression—by its very nature—is an expression and reflection of the artist’s view of human nature and the universe humans inhabit. It is impossible to divorce one from the other because it is impossible for the poet to divorce the inner world of his/her being from the external world that he/she believes to be inhabiting. For, the attempt at such a divorce itself reveals a definite worldview. While critics may quibble and some may quarrel over such propositions, it can be shown that twentieth century approaches i.e. Modernist approaches to classical works reveal the above observations to be true in very important instances, such as that of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” These are instances that cannot and should not be overlooked or ignored because their implications for art—past, present and future—are simply too great.
Anyone who has taken a creative writing course or studied literature in a Western university in recent decades will immediately find him/herself familiar with the twentieth century outlook we are identifying—it permeates the world of literature today. However, it is not simply a “literary” outlook, it permeates all spheres of thought, including politics and law, its seed having been planted in the imagination by the twentieth century world of arts and letters.
Most Western denizens will likely not even be aware that they harbor such axioms because the view is ubiquitous in Western society. Finding new ways to create and impress effects on an audience has become the main task of the artist; little thought or care goes into considering whether such an approach involves any intelligible idea or universal significance. It is simply believed that works have different significance for different people; words, ideas—everything has a unique and different significance for different individuals.
In and of itself, the view would be fine if there weren’t at the same time something universal about a great work, but something universal involves the idea of the True, which the twentieth century outlook expressly objects to. The critic may argue that the aesthetical views they propound should not be confounded with the larger questions of truth, but the reality is the critic is essentially attempting to enforce their own set of arbitrary axioms over the world of art and the imagination, arguing that these views have no bearing on the greater debate over Truth.
The reality is that the debate over truth is most emphatically settled in the realm of the arts. It could even be argued—though this goes beyond the scope of our essay—that the dominant view in the arts will be one of the primary influences on what scientific school tends to dominate society.
What Is Perfection?
The essence of all great art accomplishes the much more difficult task of succeeding in both the goal of having unique personal originality as well as universal significance. It is a task much more difficult than simply weaving a series of finely crafted free-associations, or highly stylized language that generate some rousing and compelling impressions for an audience.
In the words of Edgar Allan Poe:
He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind — he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us — but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, —or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves melted into tears — we weep then — not as the Abbaté Gravina supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.
– Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Poetic Principle”
Anyone who thinks Poe is simply waxing-poetic, or availing himself of artful rhetoric for purely artistic edification is mistaken. The aforementioned observations and distinctions in thinking among different artistic approaches is crucial to identify because one of the primary underlying assumptions of twentieth century Modernism is that artists gained new degrees in freedom of expression, liberation from pre-established forms, traditions and authorities, and that this freedom translated into greater levels of originality and a wider expanse of genuine artistic vision.
The reality is that the artist and audience became alien to each other: every individual became an isolated person with his/her own set of definitions, words and idiosyncrasies—the whole world of art became like two strangers in a one night stand, with neither knowing anything about the other and neither wishing to know anything about the other—knowledge of which would probably spoil the experience, so too was an impersonal and object-fixated relationship created in the world of art. It was a relationship in which substance and depth were considered two completely different things that could be disassociated at will—things that had to be disassociated in order for the “magic” of art to be unleashed.
Thus, Dante Gabriel Rosetti—an ardent gnostic and leading Pre-Raphaelite thinker—a great precursor to literary Modernism—was a poet and painter who had expressed how much he abhorred the reading of Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life) because Dante accompanied his poems with prose explanations on how he crafted his poems and formed them into harmonious wholes—no such kind of discussion of method and underlying principles was permitted in “New Criticism.”
As we stated, from the Modernist viewpoint, one could be a Jesus-loving Satanist, or a love-making sadist psychopath—it did not matter whether the artist’s concepts shared any logical relation or rational connection—what mattered was the novel effect that the artists could achieve with their new novel combinations. What mattered was the “new” experience for the audience, an audience that would of course develop an ever more insatiate appetite for new forms of entertainment and stimulation, rather than a desire for ever new enriching glimpses from the eternal and infinite realm of the arts—a taste that never bitters and in which Truth only grows sweeter.
The insatiate lust for the “new” would inevitably drive one towards an ever expanding decadence. Ultimately, the Modernist never came to terms with the reality that some things do not change, some things are unchanging—they are eternal. The typical Modernist would have rejected this idea. Instead, art dealt with the stranger and stranger, the darker and darker, but never lighter and lighter nor higher and higher—never more whole or harmonious. A new infinite world of effects—unfettered by the demands of reason or the human mind—was now opened up—art was free. The Beautiful and True had filed for divorce.
By contrasting the outlook of Modernism with the outlook expressed by Keats’ famous ode, we are afforded a unique lens by which to examine the many meanings and paradoxes of Modernism, and in so doing, we will gain a clearer understanding of what an audience can discover and benefit from in a revived tradition of classical or timeless art—a tradition that is impossible to translate or discuss in Modernist terms without fundamentally distorting and perverting the essence of what we are investigating.
What is Timelessness?
Over the years, many names have been adopted to represent the Modernist outlook, names that carry different ideological flavors, but ultimately contain the same essential ingredients. As we mentioned before, variations on the Modernist recipe included—but were not exclusive to—Modernism, Post Modernism, Cubism, Formalism, Imagism, Post-Humanism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Deconstructionism, and Contemporary thinking. It is not to say that any of the aforementioned outlooks were without commendable precepts or intentions, but only that they shared one common fatal axiomatic flaw, a flaw in which, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
Investigating how the Modernist perspective and its contemporary evolutions apply to the reading of a poem in the classical tradition, such as Keats’ great “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (or any of the Great Odes) offers us the quintessential example of Modernism’s tragedy.
If one reads The Poetry Foundation’s “poem guide” for the Ode on a Grecian Urn, “How to read the most famous poem ‘for ever’” by Camille Guthrie, the author conspicuously fails to address the central irony of Keats’ ode. In fact, The Poetry Foundation’s critic fails to identify virtually all of the ode’s ironies. Instead, the author prefers to describe the various “enigmatic” qualities of Keats word-choice and imagery, but the reader is left in the dark as to the purposes for all said artistic decisions described.
In of one of the guide’s opening paragraphs, Guthrie makes the following remarks:
Keats would like to engage with this ancient object, but he can’t, so he must address it from many animated angles. Unravish’d, a fascinatingly ambiguous word, helps us understand this multiplicity—to ravish means passion and violence. Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive? Is it intact throughout its history? Usually poets represent contraries in binaries, yet Keats’s eagerness demands a third option, an aesthetic tactic that enacts his idea of negative capability—to embrace contradictions and uncertainties “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
Guthrie essentially offers us a gnostic modern/existentialist reading of Keats’ Ode: “the poem does not have one meaning” it is “overwrought” — there is no such thing as “reality,” there are many realities; “Keats is simply exploring the many realities that the work of art makes possible.” Guthrie essentially treats art as if it were some type of LSD-inspired experiment in therapeutics. She treats the metaphorical idea of Keats’ statement, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” in a literal fashion because a higher metaphorical discussion of its meaning would go against the underlying beliefs guiding the critic’s method; and more importantly, it would go against what the author in all likelihood believes.
As a result, the ode’s meaning is intentionally or unintentionally obscured. There is also the suggestion that a literal reading of the statement is somehow more precise than a metaphorical i.e. non-literal reading; irony is replaced by the idea of “enigmatic” images. Keats’ conception of “Negative Capability” is treated as if Keats had a gnostic and existential outlook on the world, an outlook in which there is no real meaning or in which various alternative meanings exist. To gain a deeper insight into the ode, Keats’ thinking should be situated within the Platonic Greek tradition and the Socratic tradition that deals with the question of incommensurables, with the questions of Truth, like the paradoxical relationship between the finite and the infinite or the “One” and the “Many.” From the standpoint of this Greek tradition, all the ironies of the “Grecian Urn” come into focus.
If the reader situates Keats within the tradition that he most identified with, namely that of the classical Greeks and Shakespeare, many of the “enigmatic” aspects of Keats’ ode become intelligible ironies. We discover Keats’ stalwart “Greekism,”—a Platonic tradition and the method of Socratic dialogue. We must only be willing to do exactly what “New Criticism” DOES NOT want us to do, namely to have “extrinsic’ critical approaches, which concerned themselves with such matters as authorial intention, historical, moral or political considerations, and audience response. All we need to do to investigate the ode’s greater significance. In a word: we must take the opposite of “New Criticism.”
When Socrates says, “All I know is I know nothing,” he is not literally saying he believes he knows nothing, he is making an epistemological point about the nature of knowledge in which truth is often better defined not by the right answers, but the right questions. Even if Plato wrote in prose form, he was a poet; his language was deeply metaphorical and nuanced i.e. poetic and was therefore able to convey a richer meaning than could be done with mere prose i.e. “consecutive reasoning” in Keats’ terms.
In his Dante essay, Eliot sates, “The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me,” but when Keats states, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” he is not saying that Truth for him means every factual thing that has ever occurred in human history—in which case endless horrors and tragedies could be listed, and then from this literal understanding, the reader would be forced to logically conclude that all the tragedies and horrors of history are included in Keats’ definition of Truth, and thus that all Truth is not beautiful. However, that would be silly analysis of Keats’ lines. It would silly because all great poetry is by its nature metaphorical and non-literal. A richer and more nuanced approach is necessary.
The Operations of the Human Mind
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, specifically took up the same question of language and worded the issue in the following way:
The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed. This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind; Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should impute this singularity.
There is a precision of idea, defined by “the operations of the human mind” rather than a precision of language shaped by the precise and self-evident definition of words. The author of the Poetry Foundation’s poem guide seems to wish that Keats would use words in a strict literal fashion rather than write with more nuance and metaphorical richness. But deviation from a strictly literal idea of truth is necessary to communicate a higher nuanced and rich meaning. It is a meaning that cannot be captured with the literal use of language where in the case of Keats’ famous lines, Truth would include everything that has ever happened in history—in which case there would be many non-beautiful things.
Keats’ method was Platonic in nature, the opposite of how Modernists or Formalists approached the question of poetry and composition. For the Modernist and Formalist, language is very precise and distilled—even if ideas are not—or even if ideas are altogether absent, or simply self-referential and not meant to be disclosed—their usage serving a strictly stylistic purpose.
The meaning of Keats’ Platonic statement is derived from the unfolding process of the ode as a whole—just like Plato or Socrates derived the meaning of any idea by identifying the process through which any definite meaning was arrived at. The definite meaning ascribed to a word was understood through the process by which the given literal meaning of a word had come into being. In the same way, the meaning of Keats’ “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” is defined by the “route” Keats lays out across the five stanzas of his ode; the ironies he identifies serve as our poetic guides, guides that direct us to the final sense of his ode’s meaning—more precise and nuanced.
In the same way Socrates did not deny the existence or knowability of truth, so Keats was not some existentialist character who denied any intelligible reality, or some Aldous Huxley-ite disciple who had opened the Doors of Perception and then subscribed to alternate realities.
Instead, Keats outlined a view in which the question of truth was essentially defined by the way in which we chose to approach it—HOW we chose to approach the question revealed what we believed—rather than the literal words we use of the opinions we hold on a plethora of different single issues. Truth for Keats was not relative, but it had to be judged objectively by the route taken in order to arrive at a meaning; the route was essentially an emotional development: a series of questions, transformations and epiphanies which had to become the conscious objects of our attention.
On its own, literal language will always be ambiguous because language is by its very nature nuanced; there will always be more than one way to read a word, whether it be literally, logically, metaphorically, within historical context etc… what gives a word or phrase its precise meaning is the thought imprinted in a word by the mind.
The poet largely achieves his goal through metaphor, paradox and irony—nuance. Language becomes the footprint, or a trail of footprints, left by an idea. A new idea or discovery inspires a development of language; and poetry serves as an infinite fount of new ideas whose source is the creative imagination, which in turn develops and further engenders language.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats opens his poem by offering several poetic descriptions of the urn, followed by a series of questions.
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend 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?
What kind of urn is Keats looking at? What kind of feelings does Keats experience as he analyzes the urn? What age is Keats looking at?
Keats—as interlocutor to the urn—initiates a dialogue in the same way that we can initiate a dialogue with all the great works and minds of the past—in the way Socrates initiates a dialogue with the many personages of Plato’s dialogues, personages who were real historical figures with their own sets of axioms and world views which Socrates wanted to explore and challenge for the purposes of creating a better state.
Footnotes:
[3] Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Chapter II: What is Poetry?
The yearning for harmony and perfection is an innately human desire. What else can satisfy this thirst for perfection, if not art? Even nature, in its infinite intricacies, endless complexity and sublime simplicity represents a force of danger, insurmountable obstacles and the uncertainty of the future— all these limitations great art vanquishes. And this is why art has always been one of the great battle grounds for humanity. For, if a population is not in a disposition to receive beautiful and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature in the realms of the arts, most of humanity will never be able to pursue them in the real world.
Friedrich Schiller expressed this sentiment when he encouraged his fellow artists to surround their contemporaries with:
the great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until semblance conquer reality, and art triumph over nature. (NA XX, 336/E 111)
In a famous poem by another great poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Contemplating Schiller’s Skull”, Goethe expresses his joy at the realization of precisely this idea: matter being formed by spirit, and spirit being formed into matter. The great irony, however, is that while the Modernist’s view – branded as “New Criticism” – claimed to not be concerned with philosophy, or a poem’s philosophical nature, underlying this critical approach was a very definite axiomatic system, namely that truth cannot be known—at least in art—and that there is no intrinsic value to artistic ideas; that immaterial ideas have no bearing on the real world and are not knowable as precise thought objects—only feelings could be viewed as precise and objectively knowable experiences. Everything that could not be classified in some category of objective sense-perceptual existence was cast aside into an obscure department known as “metaphysics.”
Thus, the philosophy of Modernism—typified by The Poetry Foundation’s poem guide, or T.S. Eliot’s critique of Keats’ ode—contents itself with limiting analysis of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to craft exclusively and its effects on an audience’s sensibilities. It is an outlook that has caused a great rift in the development of art and thought, and in the soul of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The result: the muses of poetic composition have been essentially enchained for more than a century.
Serious poems require serious thought. Even light-hearted poems can require serious thought, only the thoughts often come more easily, which is why we perceive them to be light-hearted, as opposed to weighty or considerable in gravity. The serious thought and effort that a young person puts into discovering the meaning of a great poem is the kind of serious thought that they can then put into the rest of their lives. It is the quality of thought they will need to apply in many of life’s most serious matters—its greatest paradoxes—paradoxes like love, mortality, creativity and the existence of something called “the universe.” Art informs our serious thinking; it inspires the angels of our better nature.
By thinking creatively, or poetically, we are not bound by the predetermined terms and definitions of a given situation, we are free to discover new ways of approaching the terms and matter of a given situation; we are allowed insights and glimpses into new levels of unchanging knowledge, ideas that persevere even as all the elements and happenings of the world around them fade, transform or mutate over time.
Modernist literary jargon will often include the requirement of precision—but it is a precision in language—not in ideas. The Modernist’s language must be clear, his/her descriptions flawless, but their ideas have no such requirements in precision. This is a very conscious bias and clear instance of where the Modernist attempt to divorce reason from poetry, ideas from language, Truth from Beauty, exposes itself in the very act of attempting to cover up its efforts, like the thief who is caught not because he was found committing a crime, but found out because of the traces he left in his attempt to cover up the crime.
The “One” and the “Many”
“Thy silent form doth tease us out of thought: as doth Eternity!”
-John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
Keats chose a Grecian Urn for his subject. Such an artistic choice should not be ignored, nor should the historical significance of the Greek artistic heritage which Keats is shedding light on. Keats was of course enamoured by the tradition of classical Greece, its beauty and naturalness. He had been exposed to its sculpture when visiting the recently stolen Elgin Marbles. The marbles of Greece, while immobile, succeed in capturing moments of intense and compelling action. Our senses perceive something at complete rest, and yet, our minds are moved. We are compelled to perceive that which is not seen, but which we are impelled to conceive of.
The Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures made under the supervision of the architect and sculptor Phidias and his assistants. They were originally part of the temple of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens.
Greek sculpture can be recognized by its characteristic irony. In classical Greek sculpture, Irony is communicated through the juxtaposition of differing actions. Our senses are captivated—captivated because the experience of the work compels us to look for something that is not there, something that it brings forward from us. In the same way, poetry is what is not said, it is that which stirs a new consciousness or heightened awareness in our mind; it is a consciousness that allows our mind to perceive that which our immediate senses and impressions cannot. Thus, great art always has a transcendent quality; it challenges us to resolve the paradox between the finite and infinite, the seen and unseen, the “One” and the “Many.”
However, if we turn our attention back to how a Modernist or Contemporary critic in The Poetry Foundation’s poem guide describes the sentiment expressed by Keats’ Ode, we find something very different and quite alien from a tradition that has existed and been carried over for millennia:
Keats surrounds the urn with all these pressing questions and tries to assure us at the end with its ventriloquent wisdom. Yet our doubts remain even in all this exquisite sound and shape—paradoxes to contemplate about art and life and beauty and truth—and that is why we are continually drawn to this poem. What is true is not always beautiful, and what is beautiful is not forever true. Negative capability may be a fantasy of identification with the Other; the Greek world was not at all ideal—the poet cannot escape his pain, yet his pain can make a marvelous poem. The poem and the urn do not have one meaning; the point is to be “overwrought”—to dwell in the difficult paradoxes, questions, and exclamations—and not reach for the simple or factual. To be human and mortal and not want to be—and to want to make art.
The question is not whether the poem has many meanings or not, but that there is Truth and coherence among these meanings. Keats opens the poem by describing the urn as something that tells us a story in ways surpassing anything that he could describe in his own verses, or simply given as some historical account:
Sylvan historian who cans’t thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
Keats becomes the interlocutor of this seemingly timeless but mute fountain of wisdom.
In the second stanza, a series of questions and paradoxical statements follow:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter
(…)
Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Before any melody is ever sung or performed, does it not exist? We are challenged to conceive of that which precedes all melody, the source from which all melody is born—the music of our inner ear and the score of the human heart. Keats is transporting us into an ethereal realm; the objects which he presents to us are not objects of the sense, but objects of the mind. For the nihilist, existentialist, modernist or contemporary thinker, these are very upsetting conceits because the nihilist, existentialist, modernist and contemporary thinker are grounded in the “Enlightenment” tradition where only that which was empirically perceivable could be accepted as “real.” What was real, Truth, became a matter of the five senses. One could not objectively speak of that which was not seen, heard, smelled, touched or tasted—and yet Keats does.
Keats develops several thought objects—“enigmatic” images –in his second stanza, which force the mind to conceive of non-literal, but just as objectively definable thought-objects, or “gestalts.” It is through the ironical juxtaposition of these “thought-objects” that one is able to arrive at Keats’ higher metaphorical meaning, or metaphor of metaphors, regarding the intimate relationship between “Beauty” and “Truth.”
Negative Capability
In the second part of the second stanza, Keats addresses the lovers on the urn directly.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
They are frozen in time; they cannot attain the object of their desire, but for just that reason, their passion and love can never fade. Keats relishes the seeming suspension of reality captured by the static nature of the urn and he proceeds to explore all of its poetic possibilities. However, these are not freedom-of-associations—Keats is hypothesizing; it is the power and freedom inherent in his choosing to allow his mind to explore the possibilities before him—his “Negative Capability”—without necessarily having all the answers i.e. not necessarily knowing what they will lead to—this defines an immense creative tension between the past, present, future, and all time—we are on the brink of Eternity. This defines the power of Keats’ “Negative Capability,” as Keats referred to it in one of his letters in which he was discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Such “negative capability”—the power and freedom of imagination—is not only the essence of great poetry, it is the essence of science. The scientist or poet is presented with a set of objective facts, images or perceptions, and they must then proceed to imagine what possibilities i.e. realities could account for the existence of the facts before them. It is a rigorous process, and also one that we grow more comfortable and accustomed to as we adopt creativity as a regular habit, rather than mere happenstance flashes and glimpses in our imagination, which may never be fully matured.
In the case of poetry, the “facts” themselves, the predicates of a work of art may also be imagined, and then the possibilities of these envisioned realities explored further. In this respect, the result of Keats’ high level of “negative capability” is pure timeless Beauty and Wisdom.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
But this state of suspended animation creates a tension with the known reality of our mortal world: if all these things fade, what remains? What can mortals cling to? “Nothing,” says the nihilist; “whatever you want—it doesn’t matter” says the existentialist; “nothing, or even if there is, we cannot know” says the gnostic. But Keats is none-of-the-above. Keats believes in the existence of creativity as a force in history and this world is his “vale” of “soul-making.”
All ideas that were ever conceived were conceived within a creative mind; none of the evolution of the human species, beyond hunting and gathering, could have ever occurred without the human creative process generating new ideas, new metaphors for making sense of the universe inhabited by our mortal selves. To then use the knowledge afforded by such ideas to create new modes of being, new platforms of economy, technologies, and an ultimately never-ending process of mining the infinite wealth inherent in the human mind, defines our species as uniquely creative. Everything else will fade. However, the existence of the creative process and its fruits can never be destroyed for just the reason, because they were never conceived of in a material world; and yet their Truth is objectively demonstrable; a Truth that the mind is able to perceive and then act on with a new heightened awareness.
All this philosophy over two lines of poetry?
Yes! That is precisely the point. Poetry says what cannot simply be said literally, but which can be discovered—discovered by our mind—because only our mind can make discoveries—even if our senses cannot. Human beings inhabit both the world of mind and of matter, we partake in both the finite and the infinite, we are both “One” and “Many.”
Chapter III: Tease Us Out of Thought
Everything needed to understand a great classical poem—or any great classical work of art—is already found within the work (historical, biographical and other related background knowledge will only serve to demonstrate the timeless and infinite nature of the wisdom embodied in a great piece of art). To the degree a work lacks a said quality of intelligibility, it is fragmentary. The skill of the artist is defined by his/her ability to weave these fragments into a harmonious whole – not only a harmonious whole of images, but a harmonious whole of idea defined by “the operations of the human mind”; the harmonious resolution of the parts—the “Many”—in a whole—the “One”—allows us to then discover this whole—the “One”—in each preceding part—the “Many.” Paradoxically, the “One” which has no parts, is only arrived at by identifying the “Many.” The leap between the “One” and the “Many” is the measure of Eternity.
More than nature, and more than anything in the universe, art affords humankind the ideals of perfection, ideals which may never be fully attained, but which for just that reason, the human species may always pursue and continue to improve upon. The great German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz termed this, “the pursuit of happiness.”
If this is true, then Beauty is Truth—a higher truth which transcends all the more unfortunate realities of a transient world, because a discernable higher truth exists which demonstrates that these tragedies are not necessary, even if they happen and will likely continue to happen—that nature and the universe are fraught with uncertainty is not something to lament, but accept and embrace, a nature that should cause a noble spirit to only strengthen their resolve and belief in the need to participate and further elaborate the creative Goodness of the human species.
Now, having kept us in a world of suspended reality for what feels like eons, with the two closing lines of the ode’s third stanza, Keats reminds us that this is only a vision, and that he must now bring us back into our mortal vale.
At the fourth stanza, Keats breaks away from all the previous thoughts and images, but does so in a lawful manner. What Keats creates is not a pastiche of images, a cubist pictorial amalgamation of disparate parts—a “Many” without the “One”—instead he directs our attention to another scene on the urn, a sacrifice:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
While having no logical connection to the scene that preceded it per se, Keats continues to build on the tension he has created, he maintains that tension – the “One” is still present – and he seeks to further unfold it—he is exploring the Urn for all its possible richness and realities in order to arrive at a higher level of reality, a transcendent truth that underlies all the images he has experienced—he is challenging the reader to situate themselves within the universal arc of history.
Guthrie was right to highlight the inherent tension of Keats’ experience at the beginning of The Poetry Foundation’s guide:
His urn, an imagined composite, reflects upon Keats’s philosophical and emotional concerns and contains his ambivalence about art and life within its rich, ambiguous tropes and vocabularies. Indeed, the poem’s ambivalences haunt its readers still.
However, to say that Keats’ was unable to engage with the ancient object is not true—it is the contrary of what happens. His interaction with the urn is infinite; all of humanity’s interaction with the urn is infinite. While humanity can never know all the particulars of something infinite, it can grasp the concept of the infinite; without it the concept of the finite becomes absurd.
While we may never know the “little town” painted on the Grecian urn, we find ourselves with a new heightened consciousness and sensibility for the totality of time and history, that though we will never know or be acquainted with the vast majority of events and people of history, we are yet capable of conceptualizing the totality of the historical process as a single “One,” and we are able to situate ourselves within that universal historical arc and act on it.
Arrived at the fifth and final stanza, Keats now redirects his intention away from the individual images and back towards the urn itself.
When old age 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 earth, and all ye need to know.
Keats treats the urn as something that not only has its roots in the past, but in the future. Or better-said, the ideas symbolized by the urn do not dwell in the past, present, or future, they are eternal; they are re-discoverable and should be rediscovered by each new generation.
Chapter IV: Conclusion
At the heart of all great art is a tension, a tension between that which we can conceive of and that which we will never be able to fully grasp; between the infinite gulf that exists between our individual mortality and the immortality of the species; between the universe in its finite present and its unbounded future, and yet, human beings can only thrive if they are willing to embrace this paradoxical reality and live a life informed by such paradoxes i.e. choosing to be creative and partake in the continuity of man’s evolution across generations and across all time. Without this “One,” the “Many” becomes meaningless; without an understanding of the unfolding process of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” its final statement is meaningless. We may choose to accept and embrace the beauty and truth of Keats’ ode, or we may simply become existentialists busy crafting our own personal narratives rather than choosing to share and partake in the common story of humanity. Modernism is essentially the “Many” without the “One”; classicism, the classical tradition of ancient Greece, the Italian tradition of Dante and Petrarch, the English tradition of Shakespeare and Keats, the German tradition of Schiller and Goethe exemplifies what happens when the “One” is united with the “Many.”
The individual who locates his/her identity in the future – who thinks and acts for generations yet unborn – acts immortally. The individual who is always only stuck in the immediate present, often feels like dying—the twenty-first century arguably has entire generations that think and feel this way—and must therefore eternally search for the next distraction. However, acting as a truly creative human being can only be willed if one has first embraced their own mortality. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most beautiful expressions of a human being embracing precisely this idea—of uniting the “One” and the “Many”—and celebrating art’s unparalleled ability to inspire this yearning in the whole of the human race. The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is Keats’ ecstatic and ekphrastic reaction to this idea.
David B. Gosselin is a poet, translator, writer, and researcher based in Montreal. He is the founder of The Chained Muse and hosts Escaping the Brave New World.
K.M. Newton, Twentieth Century Literary Theory
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Reader’s Shelley. Ed. Carl H. Grabo & Martin. J. Freeman. American Book Co., 1942. 473-512.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Reader’s Shelley. Ed. Carl H. Grabo & Martin. J. Freeman. American Book Co., 1942. 473-512.
On May 26-27, 1789, Schiller delivered the lecture titled “What Is, and to What End Do We Study Universal History?” at Jena University. It was his first lecture in his new position as Professor of History. The young Schiller’s reputation was already such, that, for his first lecture, the classroom was overflowing. A virtual march of hundreds of students occurred in the street, much to Schiller’s amusement, to secure a larger classroom, before Schiller could begin. The full translated transcript of the lecture can be found here.