Grecian Urn Research Articles

Horace Benbow and Bayard Sartoris: Two Romantic Figures in Faulkner's Flags in the Dust

FAULKNER in his third novel, Flags in the Dust, has presented us with two antithetical figures-Horace Benbow and Bayard Sartoris. Horace is the thinker, artist, and dreamer; Bayard the impulsive and reckless man of action. Despite their differences, however, both characters are romantic figures; both yearn for a finer worlda finer world than Yoknapatawpha, and perhaps this modern age, can offer. Horace with his intellectual sensibility embodies-though imperfectly-a type of Keatsian romantic, while Bayard with his love for adventure embodies the Byronic hero. Horace, a bookish intellectual, demonstrates a romantic nature in his desire for a more meaningful existence than that which he finds in his country law office. In one passage Faulkner describes Horace lying awake dreaming of a fantastic world where he could voyage beyond the moon to the ultimate roof of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in latent and golden-hooved repose.' Later Faulkner explainsHorace desired a cage in which to bar himself freedom with trivial compulsions. A topless cage, of course, that his spirit might wing on short excursions into the blue . (p. I9I). In several endeavors, Horace does actually attempt to escape his mundane existence and to actualize his dream of a finer life. He has made an abortive attempt to become an Episcopalian minister, and he is a dilettante poet and glassmaker. Nonetheless, his attempts at escape are essentially futile, ill-conceived enterprises. Twice in the novel, Faulkner recreates scenes from Keats's poems to underscore Horace's misconceived notions of romanticism and the world. In a recreation of Ode to a Grecian Urn, Faulkner describes Horace admiring a beautiful vase he has made, an almost perfect vase of clear amber which he called by his sister's name.

Keats's Cold Pastoral

During the last fifty years so much has been written about Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' that it sounds now like an old gramophone record. The hisses and scratches left by the styluses of innumerable critics have almost stifled the original voice of Keats. Some of these studies have undoubtedly been of considerable help in explaining some isolated passages in the poem, but few of us can avoid an uneasy feeling that, however interesting the discussions may otherwise be, they get us no nearer the meaning of the poem as a whole. And what is more disturbing is that the cheap soft-cover critical anthologies have made some of these commentaries so widely popular that it is now extremely difficult for young readers to respond to the poem without being constantly monitored and frequently misdirected by these influential critical opinions. This is perhaps to some extent unavoidable in a world where appreciation of literature is fast becoming an exclusively pedagogical concern. But the way we have persisted for about a century in refusing to listen to what Keats says in the poem, and tried at the same time to squeeze our favourite interpretations into it, constitutes one of the most disquieting episodes in the history of Anglo-American literary criticism.

The Truth of Imagination

There is an obscure passage in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, written in 1817, which says: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination...This does not seem to make much sense. Nor does it help much to find an echo of that passage in the famous last lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, written two years later: Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

"The Whitsun Weddings": Larkin's Reinterpretation of Time and Form in Keats

Philip Larkin's most irreverent revision of John Keats rejects the famous dichotomy of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. I have always believed, Larkin writes, beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know.' He briskly separates the realms that Keats held in ambiguous balance and denies any paramount significance to his new formulation. Such large-scale devaluation of romantic currency might be expected from Larkin, who has always made more modest claims for art. His position might with matching irreverence be summarized by revising one of his own less earnest equations: books aren't a load of truth. Yet Larkin's achievement as a poet demonstrates a more profound reappraisal of romantic values than is evident in any of his wryly dogmatic critical pronouncements. In particular, The Whitsun Weddings may be viewed as a searching revaluation of Keats's art in the Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Browning's Career to 1841: The Theme of Time and the Problem of Form

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes how, in the moment of contemplation, the poet is conscious of his limitations as an earthbound creature, one of a generation which “old age shall … waste,” one who has felt the moment of “human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” By contrast, the urn suggests the power of art to prolong the moment, to render permanent what is transitory, to recreate endlessly for one generation after the next the passion of human love. But the urn itself may not last forever; it is a “sylvan historian” which is itself the product of the “slow time” of human history, an artifact which commemorates a moment in the life of its creator and emulates eternity without itself being eternal (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity …”). It is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” but if we dwell on the ambiguous “still,” we sense that like the Elgin marbles, the urn may be subject to “the rude / Wasting of old Time,” a hint at the “magnitude of eternity” which impresses on the poet a sense of his mortality.

Million Dollar Grecian Urn Is Acquired By the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Million Dollar Grecian Urn Is Acquired By the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Applications of Communication Theory: II — Interpretations of Keats’ ”Ode on a Grecian Urn”

It is proposed that the arts and humanities have an objective substructure, along with the profound subjectivity that characterizes them. This follows if one looks upon these fields as applications of communication theory, mainly as communication-pleasure in which self-attitudes are everywhere at issue. Using Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn as an example, the paper outlines the objectivity that is substructure to the arts and humanities, paralleling the subjectivity that is substructure of science.

The Pious Frauds of Art: A Reading of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

The Pious Frauds of Art: A Reading of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

"The Self-Same Song that Found a Path": Keats and The Great Gatsby

F SCOTT FITZGERALD S favorite author was John Keats. Of Ode on a Grecian Urn Fitzgerald wrote, suppose I've read it a hundred times. About tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught chime in it and exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with 'Nightingale' which I can never read without tears in my eyes. And Eve of St. Agnes has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. 1 Even without such an explicit statement from Fitzgerald, we might assume Keats meant something like that to him. In This Side of Paradise (II, ii), Amory Blaine declaims the 'Ode to a Nightingale' to bushes and then talks about poetry, distinguishing between Keats and himself on what each finds primarily beautiful. In opening chapter of The Great Gatsby is a nightingale singing in Buchanan yard, very romantic outdoors. Several scenes in Gatsby take place in starlit nights; it is that we so often see title figure in his most characteristic pose, and it is pose of speaker in Keats lyric: man under wandering stars who wants to comprehend and join his life to a precious being of eternal beauty. Fitzgerald quite consciously draws upon Keats's language; near end of fifth chapter, there was no light save what gleaming floor bounced in from hall is clearly an echo of Keats's phrase in Nightingale: there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with breezes blown. . And another line from that poem will provide title for Fitzgerald's most ambitious work, Tender Is Night. Keats's influence on The Great Gatsby should not be under-

The Grecian urn: an archaeological approach. With six plates

The Grecian urn: an archaeological approach. With six plates

Six Characters: Pirandello's Last Tape

THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author owes its continued hold on our imagination-and its power as theatre-to the successful fusion of two orders of experience: the pain of role-playing in any life, and the painful limitations of dramatic art, particularly the crisis of post-Ibsen naturalism. The way Pirandello achieves this fusion is familiar enough and can be restated as follows. The imagined but prematurely abandoned 'characters,' who come to claim performance on the stage, feel themselves caught in the false fixity of a few moments of action; so they hope to be shown, to be re-created in the precise sense, through a different and compensating fixity: the Grecian urn perfectedness of art. But the completion and rehearsal of an unfinished play is not at all like the Grecian urn; on the contrary, it brings back the flux of life and inchoate creation, and the characters have to suffer again an awareness that exceeds their role. In effect, they react to this openness by wanting to choose the kind of play that suits them. And the two most articulate characters-the Father and the Stepmother-are torn by a desire for seemingly conflicting types of play: they want absolute fidelity to every naturalistic detail (the yellow plush of Madame Pace's sofa) while also wanting to go beyond this reduced play to express their essential inwardness: they want to be chorus, and they want to mean more than their fixed actions and words.

"Truth-Beauty" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the Elgin Marbles

"Truth-Beauty" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the Elgin Marbles

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Truth of Eternity

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Truth of Eternity

Keats’s Grecian Urn and the Singular “Ye”

Keats’s Grecian Urn and the Singular “Ye”

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Singular "Ye"

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Singular "Ye"

Form and Content in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Form and Content in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Round Table: Form and Content in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Round Table: Form and Content in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Evidence of Transcripts

Keats's Grecian Urn and the Evidence of Transcripts

Keats's Ideal in the Ode on a Grecian Urn

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.