Grecian Urn Research Articles

Aestheticism in John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn

This paper analyzes the aesthetic elements in Keats’s creative ideas by close reading to his Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is suggested that there exists a correlation between Keats’s and Wilde’s aesthetic ideas. First, both of them emphasize the effect of imagination on art; second, they separate the world of art and that of reality, confirming the autonomy and utilitarian of art; last, they both regard art as a static aesthetic activity, holding that the artist’s attitude toward everything in reality is a neutral one, and look upon the world with an artistic vision.

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

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

Syzygy of Sexual Polarities: A Juginan Psychological Elucidation of Ode to Grecian Urn

This study examines the psychological symbolism in Keatsian poetry using analytical psychology. John Keats ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is steeped in psychological, symbolic, and analytical perspectives, which are essential components of Jungian psychology/archetypal analysis. The current study aims to scrutinize the psychological and symbolic perspectives of Keats’s poem to understand the depth of psychic integration and archetypes in the text. This study analyzes ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by deploying Carl Jung’s concepts of syzygy or complementation of psychic energies of anima in the males and animus in the females. The term syzygy signifies a union of opposites like anima and animus and the conscious or collective unconscious. This process of complementation or complementary opposite of integration in the ode has symbolic interaction between the conscious male persona (animus) and the collective unconscious female persona (anima). Based on a close reading of the poem from a Jungian perspective, the current study provides a psychological understanding of poetic creation by underlying the conscious acts and thinking of the author as psychic interactions. This study aims to understand the symbolic representation of opposing psychic energies in Keatsian poetry. Moreover, the study analyzes the interpretation and the balance of male and female energies in Keats' poetry mean for the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, and its effect on the poetic creativity and inner peace of the author. Thereby, the study elaborated that Keatsian poetry is a true depiction of Jungian psychology.

The Cathexis Reflection of Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats in the Light of Sigmund Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious Mind

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats delineates a theory of unconsciousness in the light of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective. This study scrutinizes Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind in the way which penetrates one of the most memorable and notable poems, Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats in the Romantic Period. It shall then carry on perusing Keats in a novel layer, adopting Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind as a cathexis reflection of the poem. By juxtaposing the psychoanalysis perspective and the noteworthy poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, the research unveils in what aspects Freud’s psychoanalytical interpretation conveys the psychological stimulus behind the poem. The research probes the extent that John Keats’s reflection on the poem plays a pivotal role as a cathexis in the sense of Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind, which is the area that the reader sees the concepts psychoanalytically articulating in the poem. From the late 18th to the mid-19th century, framing the Romantic Period, this study attempts to disclose the unconscious impulse behind Keats’s reflection on the poem by demonstrating how the poem decodes itself as a way of cathexis from Freud’s term of Sublimation.

EKPHRASIS IN KEATS’S “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN”

In order to fully question the issue of ekphrasis in John Keats’s ”Ode on a Grecian Urn”, this paper begins by giving a brief historical and theoretical framework of ekphrasis, and then analyses a concrete ekphrasis in Keats’s poem. Historically speaking, the meaning of ekphrasis made a large shift in modern times compared to the original. Ancient Progymnasmata do not narrow the term based on subject matter, but rather define it using the category of vividness, enárgeia, and only later through the examinations of ancient ekphrasis of works of spatial arts, in literary texts as well as in rhetorical ones, ekphrasis becomes narrowed to a literary evocation of works of spatial arts. This happens in Spitzer’s analysis of the poem in the second half of the twentieth century, thus proving “Ode on the Grecian Urn” to be a crucial text in rethinking the term. This paper tends to reconcile the original and modern theories of ekphrasis through the poem itself. In a theoretical context, ekphrasis’s share in narration and description, and its discursive features are shown, opening the debate on the common linkage of ekphrasis to description, and alienation from narration. Choosing to address ekphrasis from the perspective of the ekphrastic poetry itself rather than a theoretical point of view, the paper shows how the urn cannot solely be seen as “silent” since it strives to tell a legend, a narrative, which is contained in the urn as an aesthetic object and work of sculptural art. This text does not tend to discover the real models for the ekphrasis, but it does offer some sculptural works and paintings which could have inspired Keats. The text is more inclined toward unveiling the discursive context which could have influenced the poet: the (meta)aesthetics of ancient Greece, derived both from poetry and philosophy. The most important objective of the paper is to offer a new reading of the poem through a critical dialogue with the most accepted readings of the “Ode”, primarily those of Spitzer and Brooks, and through questioning of common places in literary criticism of the poem.

Mind-modelling literary personas

AbstractThis article takes its cue from David Miall’s influential 2011 paper, ‘Enacting the other: towards an aesthetics of feeling in literary reading’, in Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds)The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 285–298. There, Miall considers the workings of readerly empathy with fictional people. He draws on work from philosophy, psychology, cognitive poetics, and both empirical and textual analysis to explore the complexities of how real readerly minds interact with fictional minds and the minds of real but remote authors. In this article, I revisit these arguments with the benefit of recent insights into the cognition of fictional minds. The key mechanism underlying characterisation, empathy, hostility, and engagement, I argue, is mind-modelling. With its origins in Theory of Mind, but extrapolated far from that simple phenomenon, mind-modelling captures the aesthetic and ethical relationships between minds both fictional and natural. I consider literary reading as a broader ecosystem: the reading mind as being embodied, enacted, and extended to include the imagined authorial mind. In recognition of Miall’s literary critical work, I will present a particular example from the poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats – not only for the analytical demonstration but also in order to show the echoes between Romantic notions of holistic engagement with nature and recent work in cognition and literature. The analysis suggests a solution to a literary critical debate around its ending. An approach situated in mind-modelling offers a principled exploration of both fictional, poetic minds as well as authorial positioning.

The Sense of an Ending: Poetic Spaces and Closure in Keats’s 1819 Odes

Following Frank Kermode’s distinction, in The Sense of an Ending, between the stability of myth and the changeability of fiction, Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’ offers an understated self-conscious presentation of myth and fiction in comparison with the Nightingale and Grecian Urn odes. All three of these odes invest in mythologies as much as they remain alert to their own poetic frames and the fictive nature of the fictions behind them. This poetic self-awareness reconnects Keats’s odes with the reality of death behind the mythic figures of nightingale, urn, and indolence. Such subtle, shifting, self-awareness is also the hallmark of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ and the poetic legacy it bestows to Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Autumn Refrain’, and ‘The Woman in Sunshine’.

Keats and Brown Reading

ABSTRACT This essay considers the impact of Keats’s cosmopolitanism and globally-informed reading on the 1820 Lamia volume, using Manu Samriti Chander’s idea of the “Brown Keats” as inspiration. In contrast to narratives that privilege Keats’s move towards an inward-looking poetics, this essay suggests that the reading that had the most influence on the 1820 volume might have been topical, outward-looking, and Brown. Using the Asiatic Researches as an example, the essay examines the influence of reports from British India on Keats’s poems, focusing in particular on Hyperion, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Isabella,” and the letters that surrounded those works. The essay shows the way that networks of Brown reading underpin the poems and create new pathways through the volume, as well as challenging what assumptions about Keats’s reading might limit our appreciation of his poetry in the present day.

Keats, the Novel, and the 1820 Volume: Romance vs. Reality, Facts vs. Imagination

ABSTRACT This essay adopts the four-stage dialectical sequence Michael McKeon proposes for the history of the British novel as a template for interpreting Keats's career, as he evolves from romance idealism to naïve empiricism, to extreme skepticism, to an aesthetic that reconciles imaginative and factual truth. Significantly, in ways not previously considered, Keats’s engagement with these issues is indebted to his reading of and responses to novels, particularly those of Walter Scott. In a key passage in his letters, Keats favors the realism of Smollett’s and Fielding’s novels over the romance of Scott’s, and in another he copies out a lengthy extract from Hazlitt’s essay “On the English Novelists,” in which Hazlitt contrasts Scott’s reliance on historical facts with Godwin’s superior insight into the human heart and mind. This essay explores these conflicts between romance and reality, facts and imagination, in several poems from the 1820 volume. The lead poem, Lamia, conveys an extreme skepticism that can endorse neither romance idealism nor naïve empiricism. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn,” however, Keats achieves an aesthetic in which literary works can be fictional and inventive but also true to lived experience.

Queer Theory in the Bardo

Queer Theory in the Bardo H. N. Lukes (bio) A Review of Foucault's Strange Eros by Lynne Huffer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. $95 hardback, $28 paper, $27.99 ebook. Foucault's Strange Eros is, indeed, a strange book, in part because it claims to be a completion of Lynne Huffer's decade-spanning trilogy about Michel Foucault's work. I do not believe her. My reasons: (a) I sincerely doubt that Huffer is done with Foucault, the proclaimed object of her mad love; (b) Foucault's Strange Eros is a book about decompletion; and (c) as with each book in Huffer's trilogy, this one is not exactly about Foucault, as it foregrounds cross-pollination as either a primary source or applicable theory rather than focusing exclusively on Foucault. Huffer's most recent volume is as much about Monique Wittig, Sappho, and Anne Carson as it is about Foucault, who prowls its pages, flashes into clarity, and then recedes, all in unpredictable rhythms. At the end of this book, Huffer includes a letter from a certain "MF," who begins, "I would have really liked to slip imperceptibly into [your book: Sapphic, like Wittig.]" (181, bracketed material in the original). Strange, then, is my task: to review a book by one author about many authors, with the eponymous one seemingly reviewing it from the grave. Once, Huffer told us that queers had gotten Foucault wrong (Mad for Foucault, 2009). Second, she held the polemical hands of feminists and queers and told us that we needed to read more Foucault to understand our differences (Are the Lips the Grave, 2013). Thrice, now [End Page 103] again, she has told us to go back to Foucault, but this time in a dreamy yet agitated state of eros (Foucault's Strange Eros, 2020). This last move advances work done in Mad for Foucault with a seemingly direct analogy: "[E]ros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness" (3). For those who misrecognize Foucault as a sort of historically minded deconstructionist, interrogation of "sexuality" and "madness" as discursive constructs might seem straightforward. Yet this analogy tells us little about these first terms, "eros" and "unreason," and even less about how these terms might make themselves known from under the carceral logic of their mates (just as Foucault's famous line "the soul is the prison of the body" does not liberate or define that body with any apposite symmetry). How unreason and eros make themselves heard as more than "a strange murmuring 'background noise'" is both the topic and method of Huffer's latest study (3). This is where things get strange. Riffing on Carson and Sappho herself, Huffer advances eros as a verb, or rather a "preverbal verb" (19). Eros emerges as a passive action of "erosion" that somehow also accretes. Eros does things and makes one do things like prowling, groping, and stalking to effect a "subtle self-undoing" in gerundive suspension at the limit of grammar (5). This verbal eros, according to Huffer, is an ethics and the heart of Foucault's archival and genealogical method. It is poetic or, as Huffer claims, an "ethopoietic method: an ethics of eros as a poetics of unreason" (2). Eros is Foucault himself, the poet chasing the historian chasing the philosopher around a Grecian urn. In, by now, classical lesbian–feminist style, Huffer inserts herself in Foucault's critical and personal roundabout. It then would stand to reason that we may make another analogy: eros is to unreason as ethics is to poetry. Yet by now it should be clear that the stabilizing grid of analogy first offered is not Huffer's jam at all, and that eros is not an "it" but rather a lesbian trickster's "ontological joke" (165). Huffer has much to say about more common Western theories of poetry, ethics, ontology, and history, but Foucault's Strange Eros delivers analysis as much through careful explication as through a torquing chiasmus that demonstrates as much as it defines the murmur of eros. This scholarly technique may sound by equal measures delightful and frustrating. It is true that the experience of reading Foucault's Strange Eros straight...

The Long Silence

The Long Silence Richard Dale Sjoerdsma (bio) EDITOR'S COMMENTARY One ought every day at least to hear a little song,read a good poem, see an excellent picture, and,if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1 Sunday, March 15, 2020. My church choir was prepared to sing Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine" at morning worship service, and Mary and I enthusiastically anticipated attending the next in our Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Sunday afternoon concert series. While challenging to the average church choir (and mine may be more average than most), "Cantique" has musical and textual depths, enhanced by an excruciatingly beautiful melody, that render it an uplifting spiritual and aesthetic experience for singer and listener. The MSO concert was to have included Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, a monument of Western music that, even after many hearings, continues to stir the soul through its inherent truth and beauty. Alas, in response to the March 11 WHO official determination that the world had been plunged into a COVID-19 pandemic, both worship service and orchestra concert were cancelled. What initially was thought to be only a minor gap in our cultural life soon became a gaping abyss. Worship took place at the altar of a computer desk or, in clement weather, in the sanctuary of one's automobile. The remainder of the MSO season was cancelled, as, unprecedentedly, was eventually the entire 2020–21 series. The long silence began. A brief but welcome interruption in the silence occurred on May 23, 2021, as a chamber ensemble version of the MSO offered a live, invitation-only concert for subscribers. A palpable joy, an almost giddy excitement, exuded from masked and separated listeners in response to an all-English concert that featured Vaughan Williams's Concerto Grosso for Strings and Holst's St. Paul's Suite Op. 29, no. 2, among others. Several weeks later, in lieu of our normal church choir, I sang at a worship service in a double quartet, to considerable applause from congregants. Finally, on October 3, 2021, we gleefully attended an inaugural MSO concert of a full 2021–22 season, a program that included Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Duke Ellington's New World a-Comin,' and Stravinsky's Suite from The Firebird. The long silence ended. Among many lessons from the pandemic—some learned, some remaining to be learned, and, lamentably, some ignored—an important one is the deep human need for truth and beauty, in community, anecdotal evidence for which, I think, is documented above. In an address to the audience before stepping on the podium to conduct the opening concert of the current season, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Riccardo Muti reminded us [End Page 315] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. Franz Schubert. Impromptu, Op. 90, no. 4, mm. 46–49. that culture is not entertainment. Culture affects our souls, minds, and interrelationships, and, as the maestro insists, we need enrichment, beauty, live music. 2 Recent years have demonstrated that a lack of culture, a neglect of beauty, can damage and inevitably coarsen a society. Exploring the ample evidence for this would lead down dark paths that I choose not to traverse at this time, although it is an axiom we forget to our ultimate abasement. Although it was not my intent when I began to draft this essay, it was serendipitous that at the outset I linked worship and music, that is, spirituality and aesthetic, as the core of my commentary. English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence said, "The human soul needs beauty even more than it needs bread." 3 A need for beauty and music carries with it a need for its inherent spiritual and aesthetic truth. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. —John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Art is a living thing that shows us truth. Sociologist Frank Furedi asserts that "[t]hroughout history the quest for truth constituted one of the most positive manifestations of our human qualities," citing Robert Browning, who wrote that "There is no truer truth...

The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices


 
 
 
 The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.
 
 
 

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Kinds of Ode: A Comparative Study

This paper brings a comparative analysis of three types of ode poems, i.e., the Pindaric, Horatian and Irregular odes. Its major focus is on the evolutionary changes of odes from its inception at Grecian to English Romantic odes which were greatly influenced by many like Roman influence, Italian influence, Renaissance and Romantic period etc. Moreover the paper gives a clear picture of ode poetry, its characteristics, form and structure and the functions of each type. Through a comparative study the distinct characteristics of the three types are explicated. Some of the ode poems of English poetry such as “The progress of Poesy: A Pindaric ode” by Thomas Grey, “Ode on Solitude” by Alexander Pope and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats have been taken as the English models of the three kinds respectively. These poems where compared with the original classical models and critically analyzed.

John Keats’s Odes: A Balm to a Tired some Soul: With Reference to Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to Autumn

John Keats’s Odes: A Balm to a Tired some Soul: With Reference to Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to Autumn

Theme of Bhaktinian nature in the Odes of John Keats

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism as a theoretical framework, this article seeks to investigate the use of dialogic voice in John Keats's Odes. This research essentially delves into a dialogic interpretation of the poems "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to Psyche," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy," from the perspectives of the poems' respective themes. Keats may be seen to be an engaged and social poet of his day if his odes are analyzed from a dialogue perspective. Furthermore, Keats is an escapist poet who seeks refuge in the realm of fantasy and imagination as a means of escaping the tensions of his time.

Stylistic Analysis of a Poem “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN” Written by John Keats

This research paper aims at investigating the text of the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written by John Keats. We made a stylistic analysis of this poem at three levels: phonological level, graphological level/grammatical level and lexical level. This research paper provides an easy understanding of the poem.

The Role of Literary Theory in Literary Translation

In literary translation, the way quality of translation is judged shows some special features. The translator’s understanding of the source language text and his creative reconstruction of the target language text place the whole process of translation under the influence of literary theories. With a case analysis of three different translation versions of John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, this paper argues that based on the given features of literary translation, the relationships between the translator and the text, and the creative role of the translator in the process of translation, literary theory plays an essential role in literary translation.

Lyric Embarrassment and the Phenomenology of Alterity in Keats’s Two Odes on Art

À la lumière des observations de Jonathan Culler sur l’embarras dont se charge l’apostrophe, l’article qui suit suggère que Keats montre dans « Ode to a Nightingale » et « Ode on a Grecian Urn » un sens aigu de l’altérité, qui lui permet de refaçonner la poésie lyrique pour en faire un genre de l’intersubjectivité. En dramatisant le rossignol antithétique et l’urne énigmatique, Keats fait le portrait d’un locuteur embarrassé, qui voit constamment lui échapper les destinataires de sa parole. L’embarras, en tant qu’affect conscient de l’être-l’autre, illustre le concept de chair selon Merleau-Ponty, qui rend compte de la réversibilité des positions entre percevant et perçu, et remet en question le dualisme sujet/objet. En mettant en lumière cet embarras lyrique — conséquence de la résistance de l’autre — Keats démontre la capacité de la poésie lyrique à négocier l’altérité.

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

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's "ode on a Grecian Urn" to demonstrate that the beauty in this poem is natural not philosophic.