^{Note 1 in page 113} Among recent critics Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, Middleton Murry, Allen Tate, and Earl Wasserman all read the ode as a form of dramatic or symbolic action. There are, however, at least two distinct approaches. Burke, Brooks, and Tate are concerned with the structure of the poem itself; on the other hand, Murry and Wasserman, while concentrating on the poem, also try to infer from earlier writings the poet's framework of thought and emotion. The second method has its pitfalls but when reasonably pursued is, I believe, the best way to study the work of a Romantic poet. Keats is as much a part of the ode as the urn itself. Some of the tension and urgency of the poem is lost when it is examined simply as artifact. Burke misreads the poem, while Brooks and Tate—though (or because) they are conservative—miss the underlying tension. The present paper is necessary because there are disturbing flaws in the readings of both Murry and Wasserman.

^{Note 2 in page 115} There are, it seems to me, at least 2 other possible meanings for this difficult line (44) : first, that the poet's total absorption in the urn precluded thought, so powerful was his aesthetic experience; second, that the urn was a means of escape from thought about the pain, the conflict of good and evil in human existence. Of these 2 interpretations I am inclined to think the first more likely.

This expression (“tease out of thought”) also occurs in the Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds (11. 76–77). The context is:

Oh never will the prize, High reason, and the lore of good and ill Be my award. Things cannot to the will Be settled, but they tease us out of thought. I confess I do not know exactly what Keats means here. I should guess that “high reason and the lore of good and ill” are the “things” that “cannot to the will be settled.” That is, he cannot determine to acquire high reason and the lore of good and ill without finding that these aspirations are too immense, too much for his intellect to grasp (like the urn, like eternity) at once; hence, he is teased out of thought.

^{Note 3 in page 117} Wasserman sees the poet's conception in a similar light: “No one,” he writes, “will deny that the ode, like most of Keats's poems, deals with the human and mutable on the one hand, and the immortal and essential on the other; and that what it states has something to do with both an opposition and a fusion of these two states.” This delicate balancing at the very bourne of heaven, this “paradoxical essence” is, in Wasserman's view, “the central principle of Keats's visions.” He calls it—borrowing a term from Kenneth Burke—“mystic oxymoron.” Accordingly, “although the ode is a symbolic action in terms of an urn, its intrinsic theme is that region where earth and the ethereal, light and darkness, time and no-time become one; and what the symbolic dance ultimately discovers is the way in which art (the urn) relates man to that region” (The Finer Tone, Johns Hopkins Press, 1953, pp. 14–16).

^{Note 4 in page 117} Cf. Sleep and Poetry, 11. 47-162; Endymion, ii.273–280; the original conclusion of The Eve of St. Agnes; and Ode to a Nightingale.

^{Note 5 in page 117} The climax occurs at this point of tragic awareness, in the final stanza. Wasserman is surely wrong in assuming that the climax occurs at the end of the 3rd stanza. Illuminating Keats's conception of the ideal, he makes no allowance for his growth. He holds that ideas expressed in the letter to Bailey about the imagination (22 Nov. 1817) together with important passages in Endymion (1817)—principally, the “pleasure thermometer” (i.777 ff.) and the “Hymn to Pan”—constitute both the framework in which the ode is set and the key to its meaning. In the ode, the poet's “ascent” from nature (the boughs) to music (the piper's song) to love (lover and maiden) parallels the ascent to the “chief intensity” in Endymion (i.777 ff.). The poet, by the close of the 3rd stanza, achieves a complete “empathic entrance into essence” (“fellowship with essence”) and so reaches heaven's bourne. The statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” according to Wasserman, would logically occur at this point, if it were “the total intention of the poem,” since that is what the poem up to that point has been saying. “The intention of the poem,” he decides finally, “must be to hold up art as the source of the highest form of wisdom,” since the urn speaks the “aphorism” in the last stanza (pp. 37-39, 49). Thus the conflict within the poet, which should be pinpointed since it is the drama of the poem, is allowed to fade into the background. In 1817, to be sure, Keats's subject was young love and the ideal beauty that he would win by humanitarian sympathy. His poetic ladder of ascent (Endymion, i.777 ff.) was still a luxury, a “pleasure thermometer”—a plan rather than a deed accomplished—and his humanitarianism a Wordsworthian endowment. But by 1819 the axiom had been proved on his pulses: in the interim he had experienced suffering, and he had written the fragment of an epic. His subject now was the melancholy of change and pain, and the ideal (the nightingale's song, the urn) was not so much an object of pursuit as an active comforter of human suffering. The right key to the meaning of the ode is not Endymion but, as Murry saw, the letter on the Vale of Soul-Making (14 Feb.-3 May 1819).

^{Note 6 in page 118} That Keats meant the urn to speak the last 2 lines is clear from the transcripts made by Charles Brown and Richard Woodhouse (Houghton Library), and the transcripts of George Keats (British Museum) and Dilke (Hampstead House). Punctuation in all transcripts is basically as follows: “Beauty is Truth,—Truth Beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Brown). See Alvin Whitley, “The Message of the Grecian Urn,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, No. 5, ed. Dorothy Hewlett (London, 1953), pp. 1–3.

^{Note 7 in page 119} Kenneth Burke assumes that “beauty” is “the essential word of art or poetry” and that “truth” is the essential word of knowledge or science. Then he tries to reconcile the “oracle's” statement that “Poetry is science, science poetry” by showing how, in S stanzas, the transformation was made which enabled “the romantic philosophy of a romantic poet to transcend itself” (A Grammar of Motives, New York, 1945, pp. 447–462). He does so with extraordinary agility and insight, but his conclusion (p. 462) is unconvincing. One feels, with Tate, that “Mr. Burke's own dialectical skill leads him to consider the poem, when he is through with it, a philosophical discourse” (On the Limits of Poetry, New York, 1948, p. 178). Crude equations like this cannot contain an imaginative poet's vision. Keats's line elicits a wide range of response. I. A. Richards would object to any such “translation”; he would say that Burke himself has failed to distinguish between emotive and scientific statement (Principles of Literary Criticism, London, 1925, p. 267).

^{Note 8 in page 119} I believe, with Richards, that the line is “the expression of a certain blend of feelings” (Practical Criticism, London, 1929, p. 187).

^{Note 9 in page 119} Cleanth Brooks, however, considers the lines to be a fitting conclusion. He would waive the “question of the scientific or philosophic truth of the lines” (which Burke tries to resolve), in favor of applying the principle of “dramatic propriety.” The urn's speech, “modified by the total context of the poem,” is as appropriate as the speech of a character in a drama. The urn, he concludes, says that “ ‘formed experience,’ imaginative insight, embodies the basic and fundamental perception of man and nature. The urn is beautiful, and yet its beauty is based—what else is the poem concerned with?—on an imaginative perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful but it is also true” (The Well Wrought Urn, New York, 1947, pp. 140–142, 150–151). On the other hand, Murry and Tate agree with T. S. Eliot that “in the context of the poem itself” the lines appear to be a blemish, an intrusion; for Murry, they “disturb the subtle harmony of the poem” (The Mystery of Keats, London, 1949, pp. 163-164). Tate considers them a “radical violation” in the “set limits” of the ode: “The poem gets out of form,” a “break in ‘point of view’ occurs” (pp. 179–180).

Whereas Brooks is perhaps too detached to do justice to the stresses in the poem, Murry is too absorbed. In his worship of Keats he tends to view the poem almost as mystical utterance, in which “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” becomes a saying of the same order as “God is Love” (p. 174). Consequently, the question of meaning is dissolved in wonder and mystery.

^{Note 10 in page 120} Cf. Newell Ford, The Prefiguralive Imagination of John Keats (Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 138–140. Letters, ed. M. Buxton Forman, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1952), p. 67.

^{Note 11 in page 120} I. A. Richards would call a statement like “Beauty is truth—”a “pseudo-statement,” by which he means in some instances something very close to “an expression of faith.” It is the poet's way of ordering and controlling his experience, emotions, and attitudes (Science and Poetry, London, 1926, pp. 58–59).