Ode on a Grecian Urn: Critique
and Analysis/ Keats’s poem is much like Keats himself meditated on the urn to
explore his own emotions. Discuss!
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” was
written in May of 1819 when Keats was 23 years old and his life was in
emotional turmoil. In the previous six months his brother Tom had died, and he
had met and fallen in love with Fanny Brawne who, at the time the poem was
written, lived next door to him in Hamstead.
It was a period of intense
creativity during which Keats wrote his great odes; in them, he explored his
emotions by addressing, describing and questioning some idea or symbol that he
celebrated. Keats’s odes are a form of meditative poetry. In meditation, a
person thinks intensely upon and draws conclusions from a subject. By writing
an ode, originally a Greek poetic form, Keats is making his own claim to
permanence. The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is Keats’s own “silent form” meant to
perform a similar function — “tease us out of thought” — as that of the
original Greek urn, that, ironically, does not exist. There is smooth
transition of ideas and emotions in the poem starting with:
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