Truth And Beauty

Neo-Hellenism

• Neo-Hellenism, a fashion for Greek art, was initiated by German art historian Jonathan Wickleman.
• Wickleman, a pioneering Hellenist, advocated for the classical ideal due to its "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur."
• He idealized Greece for its timeless beauty transcending history.
• J. Hates Fuseli translated Wickleman's influential work, "Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of Greece," into English in 1765.

Elgin Marbles

• Interest in Greek art increased with the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in 1816.
• The Elgin Marbles consisted of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens.
• They were acquired from the Ottomans, a point of ongoing contention for Greece.
• Keats wrote about seeing the Elgin Marbles after visiting the British Museum in March 1817.

Eternal Truth and Beauty

• The concept of eternal truth and beauty preoccupied Keats.
• This is evident in the debated aphorism in the poem's final lines.
• An aphorism is defined as a pithy observation containing a general truth.
• An epigram is defined as a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way.
• "Ecrasis is a vivid evocation of a work of art."

Final Lines: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"

• The ending of the poem states, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all. Ye know on earth and all ye need to know."
• These enigmatic lines are famous, and interpretations vary.
• If the speaker is addressing the urn, it indicates awareness of the urn's limitations.
• The equation of beauty and truth may seem limited when considering the complications of human life.
• If the urn is addressing mankind, the phrase carries the weight of an important lesson.
• The essential knowledge for human beings on Earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same.

Critical Debates and Punctuation

• Critical debates also vary in meaning, often focusing on punctuation.
• Keats was quite relaxed about punctuation during publication.
• He was also very ill when proofreading.
• Does the "urn" only say “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” while the poet utters the rest, or does the urn say it all?

Role of Human Imagination

• These lines have been interpreted as an atheistic statement on the role of human imagination.
• The imagination's role is connecting beauty, ethics, and truth.
• The imagination actively creates truth, with emotions also playing a role as a pathway to truth.

Keats: The Romantic Empiricist

• This reading references Keats' letters.
• Keats wrote, "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination."
• Keats believed that what the imagination sees as beauty must be truth, regardless of prior existence.
• He held the same idea for all passions, considering them creative of essential beauty in their sublime form.
• November 1817: The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.
• December 1817: In this reading, the urn stimulates the sense of the observer, simulating emotions as and well as imagination. This can discover subjective truths about the urn and the observer.

Prosopropia and Axiomatic Statement

• The lines shift away from the urn with the plural address, resulting in a bold, seemingly axiomatic, self-evident, or unquestionable statement.
• This statement employs prosopropia, giving a silent object voice, a common technique.
• Reflects Keats' 1890 letter to a female acquaintance: "I hope I am little more of a philosopher than I was."
• The slowed-down meter gives dramatic weight to his ostensibly aphoristic statement.
• The final lines evoke certainty but raise more questions than answers, evading certainty.

Negative Capability

• This reflects Keats' interests in negative capability.

Critical Readings

• John Barnard: The people in the urn belong to an ominous world of coldness and fixed city.
• Brian Stone: The eternal life of the cold pastoral is static and therefore not only alive in art but dead in life.
• Camille Guthrie: Keats surrounds the with all these pressing questions and tries to assure us at the end with its ventriloquant wisdom, yet our doubts remain even in all these exquisite sounds and shape, paradoxes to contemplate about art and life and beauty and truth.

Paradoxes and Questions

• The point is to be overwrought, to dwell in the difficult paradoxes, questions, and exclamations; not to reach for the simple or factual, to be human and mortal and not to to not want to be and to want to make art. Andrew Motion.
• The poem and the urn do not have one meaning.

Andrew Motion's View

• In order to fulfill himself as a beauty-loving and truth-telling poet, Keats must remain faithful to the world of experience.
• He must suffer the historical process that constantly threatens to extinguish his idealism.
• This is preferred over opting for a world of substitutions and abstractions.