Imagination, Beauty and Truth: John Keats
Imagination, Beauty and Truth: John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Letters to George and Tom Keats and Benjamin Bailey
by Fatma Nur Korkmaz
John Keats, who was born on 31 October 1795 in London, and died on 23 February 1821 in Rome, was a very different kind of Romantic. In his short life, he had to witness the death of both his parents and his brother Tom. Keats suffered a lot as a young man. He experienced the emptiness of death, but through this misery, he found the beauty and essence of being. He fell in love with life ‘again’ and ‘more than ever’. All shaped him as a great and unique poet and made him widely admired. He set many other artists a shining example, and it is no wonder that he became an indispensable name of world literature. He has over 250 surviving letters that typify his life and provide a window into his notions and poetry. In this regard, his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by referring to his concepts of ‘negative capability’, as well as ‘beauty and truth’, addressed in his letters to his brothers George and Tom Keats, and his close friend Benjamin Bailey, is worth dwelling on to have a complete understanding and appraisal of John Keats.
First of all, ‘‘Keats was never a formal critic of the sort who writes essays, reviews, and dissertations, but his marvelous letters display one of the finest critical minds ever in England.’’ (Harmon). He was the first poet who started talking about sensations. He dedicated himself to them, and the layers of sensations like taste, smell, and sound were brought to the poetic world by John Keats, and this was something new for the poetry world, which normally brings only a visual picture of things. Keats put a new and different complexion on poetry by dwelling on ‘sensations’, rather than ‘thoughts’: ‘‘O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.’’ (Keats), and by doing so, he brings the importance of ‘senses’ to appreciate ‘beauty’ to light. Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, which includes a lot of romantic themes like imagination and feelings, should be considered within this context. In the poem, John Keats talks about both what’s painted on the ancient Greek urn and what all this work of art represents. He asks questions about the pictures illustrated on the urn, but he never provides any answer to these questions. They remain unanswered: ‘‘What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (Keats 8-10). In addition to that, in the ode, there is an ‘unravished bride of quietness’ with a ‘Bold Lover’ who is so close to kissing her, but never be able to do. He wants it to happen, but it will never occur since they are frozen. It is terrifying, however; it is also wonderful that the love between the girl and the boy will never fade or become ordinary. It will last forever. In the poem, there is somebody playing a flute, but that music will never be heard: ‘‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter’’ (Keats 11-12). There is also a heifer that will be a sacrifice, but that little cow will always be on the walk to death but will never die. There is permanence in all these figures depicted on the urn, but this permanence is both amazing and terrifying. To make it clear, on one hand, Keats presents a world of imagination with all its beauty, mysteries, and doubts. On the other hand, all these things are not realistic, because life never stays the same, love does not last forever, and all creatures do fade. Beauty is something so natural it never infirms, neither nor does truth. The truth lies in beauty: ‘‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’’ (Keats, 49-50). But how is it possible to know the truth? For Keats, it is possible with imagination: ‘‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination-- What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not…’’ (Keats), and it does not necessarily have to exist in the outside world. If it is imaginable, then it is truth, and this truth cannot be reached by ‘consequitive’ or ‘discursive’ reasoning: ‘‘I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning…’’ (Keats). It is an Enlightenment attitude, and John Keats disapproves and rejects ‘‘any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’’ (Keats). With discursive reasoning, a person only works with his mind. He does not take into account his feelings, his intuition, and his sense of history, and while focusing on facts, he also loses what is magical. He loses the ‘Mystery’ of beauty, indeed. Of course, reasoning is a great faculty of mind and important for Romantics, but it has to be taken into account with feelings, history, intuition, and mostly imagination. Speaking of ‘Mystery’, here, it would be fitting to touch upon how the word is crucial for John Keats and for his concept of ‘negative capability’, which is used for the first and only time in his letter to his brothers George and Tom Keats, and not repeated. However, the word ‘Mystery’ was used on two occasions in this short letter. It is clear that ‘Mystery’ has an important place in Keats’s concept of ‘negative capability’. Returning to the subject, ‘negative capability’ is the ability ‘‘which Shakespeare possessed enormously’’ to accept the ‘‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without ‘any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’, as mentioned before (Keats). It is the idea of accepting the impossibility of knowing all things, all mysteries in the world and leaving them as they are, without trying to figure them out, but even celebrating these mysteries: ‘‘We feel that the events we have witnessed do indeed convey a significance, one that is beyond any practical moral conclusion, but we cannot formulate what it is, and with this ‘‘half knowledge’’ we ‘‘remain content’’; we find ourselves in ‘‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’’ and take pleasure in being there.’’ (Kermode, et al.), and only when a great poet is in a state of negative capability, he is able to become a ‘Man of Achievement’, or ‘Men of Genius’ in literature (Keats). For Keats, Shakespeare was the first among these ‘Men of Genius’. ‘‘When he was started his first long poem, Endymion, on the Isle of Wight in 1817, Keats imagined Shakespeare as the genius presiding over him. The thoughts on literature that he shared in his letters are always deeply interesting, but their power also comes from their urgency, an urgency derived from the single-minded dedication with which Keats pursued his ambition to become a great poet.’’ (Hebron). Here, it is significant to touch upon whether he considers himself a ‘‘Man of Achievement’’ or ‘‘Man of Genius’’, or not. As is known to all, he died of tuberculosis when he was only 26 years old, and he was a man who always thought that he and his works would fade and be forgotten one day: “If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered”(Keats). Furthermore, he felt insecure and was doubtful of ‘his own ability to achieve ‘‘negative capability’’, and this becomes clear in his letter to his close friend Benjamin Bailey: ‘‘I am continually running away from the subject—sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind—one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits—who would exist partly on sensation partly on thought.’’ (Keats), and even his ‘self-written epitaph’ bearing these words ‘‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.’’ (Tutton). However, things do not always go as we thought, and it did not go as Keats thought. Today, he and his works wouldn’t fade and be forgotten, and still touch people’s lives, luckily.
‘‘A drawing by Keats after an engraving of the ‘‘Sosibios Vase’’, a marble volute krater dated to around 50 BC, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. This vase is said to have inspired Keat’s poem.’’ (Milns).
Works Cited
Harmon, William, editor. Classic Writings on Poetry. Columbia University Press, 2003. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.7312/harm12370. Accessed 25 May 2022.
Hebron, S. (2014, May 15). British Library. Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability
Hobkinson, S. (2014, April 5). The Romantics- Eternity (BBC documentary).YouTube. Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mefXs5h9o
Keats, J. Ode on a Grecian urn by John Keats. Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
Kermode, Frank, et al. eds. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature Volume Two. NY; London; Toronto: OUP, 1973.
Milns, R D, “Ode to a Grecian urn”. Antiquities Museum. (2018, October 10). Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://antiquities-museum.uq.edu.au/event/session/462
Poetry Foundation editors, “Negative capability”. Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/negative-capability
Keats, John. Colvin, Sidney, ed. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends. Project Gutenberg. Release Date: March 28, 2011 [eBook #35698] Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35698/35698-h/35698-h.htm
Ode to a Grecian urn. RD Milns Antiquities Museum. (2018, October 10). Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://antiquities-museum.uq.edu.au/event/session/462
Tutton, L. “Keats and 'negative capability.'” Wordsworth Grasmere. Accessed May 25, 2022, from https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2015/08/25/keats-and-negative-capability/
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