Keats's Urn and Ovid's Pygmalion

Abstract

Scholars have commonly speculated on how Keats, in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819), may have collected ideas for the poem's theme, central artefact, and split bacchic and sacrificial scenes from his known encounters with a number of classical vases and the works of various artists and writers.! An additional and hitherto unrecognised single inspiration for all of these aspects of the ode: theme, artefact and split frieze elements, however, may be found in the story of Pygmalion in Ovid's the Meta1110rphoses (c. AD 8). Keats's use of this collection of myths in the composition of EndY111ion (1818) and Hyperiol1 (1818-19) has been recognised from as early as 1905,2 but the apparent connections between Ovid's Pygmalion and the urn poem, it seems, have not yet been examined. In Ovid's recounting of the myth, Pygmalion, offended by the sexual wantonness of Cyprus's female inhabitants, and seeing how they 'spend their times/ So beast-like; [he] frighted \\lith the many crimes/ That rule in women';3 rejects the fleshly revelry he finds around him and chooses a 'higher' state of celibacy. Similarly, the speaker of Keats's ode, inspired by the urn's transfixed