On the Eternity of Beauty Again-Reading John Keats’s “ode on a Grecian Urn”

Dongmei Song

doi:10.5539/ass.v15n7p169

Abstract

John Keats was one of the most important figures of the early nineteenth-century Romanticism. He pursed all his life the eternal beauty and truth and showed a certain indulgence in the appreciation of beauty. This essay analyses why Keats never belongs to the school of Aestheticism, interprets the use of the images in John Keats&#39;s &quot;ode on a Grecian Urn&quot; to demonstrate that the beauty in this poem is natural not philosophic.

Highlights

Romanticism, which Victor Hugo calls “Liberalism in Literature”, is “a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world” (Zhang, 2006)
Scholar David Wright once said in his English Romantic Verse “There was no such thing as a Romantic Revival
It was rather a birth of a new kind of sensibility which had to do the new kinds of environment that man was in the process of creating for himself” (David, 1986)

Summary

Introduction

Romanticism, which Victor Hugo calls “Liberalism in Literature”, is “a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world” (Zhang, 2006). Many of the ideas and themes in Keats’s poetry are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passion to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. He has the power of entering the feelings of others—human, animal, even static things e.g. a Grecian urn which will be analyzed as a symbol of eternal beauty later in this essay. Keats thought that imagination is the driving force of knowing and achieving beauty He used many images in his odes to symbolize and express eternal beauty. In the same letter mentioned above, he wrote “...imagination is true, beauty through imagination is true because all our passion, just like the passion of love, in their lofty state can create beauty in essence...” Keats pointed out that during the aesthetic process, the poet should be satisfied with his own passion but with the others passion to achieve rich and delightful imagination and to find vivid language to show his beauty more completely

Why Keats Never Belongs to the School of Aestheticism

Interpretation of the USE of the IMAGES in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”