“Heard Melodies are sweet, but those unheard are Keatsean”: Linguistic Blind Spots in Ode on a Grecian Urn

Abstract

John Keats’s famous Ode, although well-received by the critical fraternity at large, continues to baffle many, as it anxiously unites the ekphrastic with the epigrammatic, the unheard with the overheard, and most controversially, beauty with truth, towards its end. The blind spot, created through an inapparent harmony is, I argue, the result of a misreading of Keatsean ideology in general. Ode on a Grecian Urn is the product of an intellectual and ideological entanglement with the philosophers of the German Enlightenment, especially Friedrich Schlegel, whose On the Study of Greek Poetry (originally published in 1797) remains the most prominent influence of Germanic Hellenization on Keats. Furthermore, the Ode must not be read as an allusive perpetuation of aforementioned influences, but a conscious departure from it, vis-à-vis allusion and the false consciousness of reality birthed within the linguistic perfection of epigrammatic utterances in the poem. This is complicated by the manifold references to psycho-physiological exhaustion across the poem whose origins, I emphasize, are to be comprehended linguistically, for Keats carefully resists third-order ideology through punctuated lines and their subsequent parentheses, where Keatsean counter-argument exists in-between ideologically approved, rhetorical exuberance and pauses that should ideally symbolize an inside-out reading, or reading the text backwards. Particular emphasis is laid on the second and fifth stanzas of the Ode, and the connotative implications of words like “goal”, “cloyed” and “wilt”. Through close-reading and textual analysis, I further argue how Keatsean resistance often exposes the written lie without uttering the textual truth. By way of a conclusion, I shall present the different adaptations of an apparent dialectic harmony between “beauty” and “truth” amongst the Victorians, early and late, but also how the transcendental illusion of dialectic harmony, in essence, is the mutual contradiction of an antinomian sublime, fabricated to indulge in the false consciousness of Germanic Hellenization while re-textualizing itself palimpsestically in an analytic reading. Keywords: Greek Poetry; Keats; Grecian Urn; Germanic Hellenization; Ideology