Ode on a Romantic Poet
Keats House invites the visitor to “discover the beauty of poetry” amid London hustle and bustle. It seems like a simple proposition but this is Keats House and anyone familiar with his work will question the nature of the “beauty” to be discovered. Keats after all is the cause of a long simmering debate over the nature of beauty.
The debate centres around the famous ending to his iconic poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
Although accepted by many as a profound statement, it is argued over by others with a passion nearing vehemence. Beauty and truth are not traditional bedfellows in Western thought. We are confronted by “the ugly truth” and “seduced by beauty”. Even Shakespeare warned us in Sonnet 70 that “The ornament of beauty is suspect” before linking the two in Romeo’s words “I never saw true beauty till this night.” How then can Keats suggest beauty is truth, is he handing down wisdom or is it an ironic finale, suggesting we don’t really know the truth?
Harvard University Professor Majorie Garber has long argued for a re-examination of the casual equation of beauty and truth. She points to the contentious use of quotation marks which do not appear in the first three transcripts of the poem but make an appearance in the first published edition, reportedly overseen by Keats himself. Renowned Keats expert Jack Stillinger gives no less than four possible interpretations of the line, based on who may be speaking; the poet to the reader, the poet to the urn, the poet to the figures on the urn or (most popularly presented) the urn speaking to humanity. Additionally, many ask how the equation can be accepted when truth is often so far from the ideal of beauty, so far from flawless? Should we really label accurate descriptions of war and atrocity as beautiful?
To reconcile these issues, I think a deeper understanding of Keats is needed. You need to dig deeper into his poetic philosophy so vital to Romantic poets. In Keats’ letter to Wordsworth in 1818 he defined his idea of the “poetical character” as “everything and nothing, it enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated”. It must be remembered Keats’ own life was so often foul, low, poor and mean, shadowed by his own illness and the deaths of his mother and brother, yet it produced so many bright stars. Keats insisted the poetical character “does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.” He was obviously able to hold an image of beauty that embraced an ugly truth, and he felt that ugly truth was not a diminisher of beauty but rather a contributor to it.
If we struggle with these final lines today, perhaps it is because we have forgotten Keats’ idea of “Negative Capability”, the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to reconcile the contradictory aspects and make them fit into a closed and rational system. All we need to know is “beauty is truth, truth beauty” because that is all we need on earth. We don’t need it proven, we don’t need it logically explained, we don’t need it squashed into a rational world view. As a piece of wisdom, it is “everything and nothing” and in the end, it is simply “speculation”. There’s a kind of poetry in that. Don’t you think?
M.Garber “”(Quotation marks): Critical Inquiries, Vol 25, No 4, 1999
J.Stillinger The Poems of John Keats, 1978