Read complete books and articles on: Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats, John - 1795–1821, English poet, b. London. He is considered one of the greatest of English poets.

The son of a livery stable keeper, Keats attended school at Enfield, where he became the friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son, who encouraged his early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle, and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817. It included "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "Sleep and Poetry," and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure, it is nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands to find himself attacked in Blackwood's Magazine—an article berated him for belonging to Leigh Hunt's "Cockney school" of poetry—and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of 1818 mark a turning point in Keats's life; he was forced to examine his work more carefully, and as a result the influence of Hunt was diminished. However, these attacks did not contribute to Keats's decline in health and his early death, as Shelley maintained in his elegy "Adonais."

Keats's passionate love for Fanny Brawne seems to have begun in 1818. Fanny's letters to Keats's sister show that her critics' contention that she was a cruel flirt was not true. Only Keats's failing health prevented their marriage. He had contracted tuberculosis, probably from nursing his brother Tom, who died in 1818. With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of poetry published in England in the 19th cent. He died in Rome in Feb., 1821, at the age of 25.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked, with Shelley and Byron, as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy" are unequaled for dignity, melody, and richness of sensuous imagery. All of his poetry is filled with a mysterious and elevating sense of beauty and joy.

Keats's posthumous pieces include "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in its way as great an evocation of romantic medievalism as "The Eve of St. Agnes." Among his sonnets, familiar ones are "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Bright star! would I were as steadfast as thou art." "Lines on the Mermaid Tavern," "Fancy," and "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats's finest work is in the unfinished epic "Hyperion." In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term "negative capability"—"to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought."

Bibliography

Keats's letters (ed. by H. E. Rollins, 1958) vividly reveal his character, opinions, and feelings. See his poetical works, ed. by H. W. Garrod (2d ed. 1958); his autobiography, ed. by E. V. Weller (1933); biographies by A. Ward (1963), W. J. Bate (1963, repr. 1979), R. Gittings (1968), A. Motion (1998), and of his last days by J. E. Walsh (2000); studies by W. J. Bate (1945), M. Dickstein (1971), and D. van Ghent (1983).

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9 of the Best Books and Articles on: Ode on a Grecian Urn

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

John Keats: Selected Poetry ("Ode on a Grecian Urn" begins on p. 177) » Read Now
by John Keats, Elizabeth Cook. 264 pgs.

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This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his...
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This is an entirely new selection of Keats's finest poetry containing all his best known work as well as a sample of less familiar pieces. Keats published three volumes of poetry before his death at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, while many of his contemporaries were prompt to recognize his greatness, snobbery and political hostility led the Tory press to vilify and patronize him as a "Cockney poet." Financial anxieties and the loss of those he loved most had tried him persistently, yet he dismissed the concept of life as a vale of tears and substituted the concept of a "vale of Soul-making." His poetry and his remarkable letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding and his final volume, which contains the great odes and the unfinished Hyperion, attests to an astonishing maturity of power.
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2.

Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, in Studies in Romanticism » Read Now
by Klaus Hofmann. 34 pgs.

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3.

The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form » Read Now
by Bernard Blackstone. 426 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Chap. 10 "The Grecian Urn") » Read Now
by Hermione de Almeida. 418 pgs.

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Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns...
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Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns of Romantic medicine--the physician's task, the meaning of life, the prescription of disease and health, and the evolution of matter and mind--and reveals their expression in Keats's poetry and thought. By delineating a distinct but unknown era in the history of medicine, charting the poet's milieu within this age, and providing close reading of his poems in these contexts, Romantic Medicine and John Keats illustrates the interdisciplinary bonds between the two healing arts of the Romantic period: medicine and poetry.
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5.

Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism (Chap. 2 "Antiquity, Romanticism, and Modernity: 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'") » Read Now
by James O' Rourke. 193 pgs.

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James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them...
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James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present.
While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female", and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's,most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.
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6.

Platonism in Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' in Philological Quarterly » Read Now
by Thomas C. Kennedy. 23 pgs.

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...Platonism in Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn. by Thomas C. Kennedy...concern for the reading of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are the following meanings...twentieth-century...
7.

Plato and the English Romantics: Dialogoi ("The Hermeneutics of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'" begins on p. 49) » Read Now
by E. Douka Kabitoglou. 326 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library
8.

Freneau's "Indian Burying Ground" and Keats' "Grecian Urn," in Early American Literature » Read Now
by Martin E. Itzkowitz. 5 pgs.

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...with Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn," despite the...What is the scene on the urn? What does it mean? A tentative conclusion...stanza of the "Ode" ("Who are these...Citations...
9.

The Muse in Chains: Keats, Durer, and the Politics of Form, in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 » Read Now
by Grant F. Scott. 23 pgs.

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...The heifer in stanza 4 of "Ode on a Grecian Urn"--"all her silken flanks with...If by Dull Rhymes" and in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" respectively to discipline...Teunissen and...