Ode on a Grecian Urn: Keats’s “Laocoön”

Abstract

E D I T O R ’ S C H O I C E * O D E O N A G R E C I A N U R N : K E A T S ’ S “ L A O C O O N ” JO H N J . TEU N ISSEN a n d EVELYN J . H IN Z University of Manitoba “ f ' i VJriticism based solely upon general principles may lead to conceits which sooner or later we find to our shame refuted in works of art.” 1 Though G. E. Lessing, who made the observation in his Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, was pointing to the consequences of the ut pictura poesis premise as it was reflected in the critical theories and practice of his eighteenth-century European contemporaries, to few situations is his analysis more directly applicable than to Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. For not only is the Ode a work of art which poetically illustrates Lessing’s thesis that the methods and objectives of the painter and sculptor are different from those of the poet, the very argument of the poem concerns the “conceits” which have developed from the ut pictura poesis generalization, specifically the idea that the spatial arts are superior to the temporal. Furthermore, it would seem to be precisely a tendency to argue from general principles which has prevented critics from recognizing that it is this aesthetic issue which is the true subject of the Ode. Interpretations of the Ode generally fall into two major categories: either the Ode is approached as a poem which is concerned with the relative attrac­ tions of art and life; or it is approached as Keats’s dramatization of the para­ dox of the “silently speaking” urn, his own attempt to approximate the art of sculpture. Within these two general categories there are areas of disagreement, but basically these consist in the positive or negative expression of the same common approach. Thus in the case of the former category, some critics argue that the poem celebrates art over life, while others argue that Keats is *The category of “Editor’s Choice” has been established by the Advisory Editorial Board for those essays which, for reasons of subject, methodology, conclusions, or the like, fail to gain the unqualified acceptance of the usual panel of readers for the Journal but which the Editor feels should nevertheless — perhaps because of their very unortho­ doxy or controversiality — be offered to the readers of English Studies in Canada for their consideration. E n g l is h St u d ie s in C anada, vi, 2, Summer 1980 on the side of life versus art, and still others argue for a quasi-platonic or philosophical reconciliation between them. Similarly, in the case of the latter approach, some critics argue that Keats does successfully demonstrate that the urn is a “historian” and concern themselves with the way in which he dramatizes this paradox, while others argue that it is not a very convincing demonstration.2 In a few studies, most of them brief explications of single lines, tentative suggestions have been made that point in the direction we shall be taking,3 but no systematic or extensive study of the Ode as a work which explores and refutes the ut pictura poesis thesis and in turn gives the laurels to poetry has been conducted, while instead the two approaches we have outlined continue to reflect the prevailing tradition in criticism of the work. Now the reason for this situation, as suggested at the outset, would seem to be the very tendency which Lessing decried of arguing from general prin­ ciples or conventional données. For the cornerstone of the “life versus art” approach to the poem stems from a kind of universalizing habit whereby the “urn” is assumed to be synonymous with and symbolic of all art, instead of representing the plastic or visual arts per se. Similarly, the premise which seems to inform discussions of the urn’s ability to speak is that the historical climate during which Keats composed the Ode was one which saw the archeo­ logical discovery of the Elgin Marbles and...