Keats's Ideal in the Ode on a Grecian Urn

Abstract

Rooted in awareness of pain and flux, Keats's odes of 1819 reveal the poet's desire to escape the painful actual and seek repose in beauty, in the ideal. More than any other of the odes, the implicit subject of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is the ideal itself. While the permanence of art is the poet's bulwark against flux, it is not the ultimate perfection that he seeks. Too many inner tensions, as the poem develops, shape the ideal into something much more complex, unattainable in either life or art since it encompasses both life and art. Keats's attempt to define this ideal accounts for the difficulty of the concluding lines. The purpose of this paper is to try to illuminate Keats's mode of thought and feeling as he wrote the poem and thereby, perhaps, to approach more closely his meaning.