Keats - A Genius

The author that I have selected for this paper is John Keats. John Keats brings the scene to life, enticing the reader to use all of their senses, as if the reader was right there at that moment. I would rate him a true genius. Genius can be defined is a person with an unusually high intellectual ability. Also, the genius is defined as the practical embodiment of a high level of innate creative potential of the individual in relation to other persons, recognized by society.

The discussion mentioned below is about one of his greatest works. This discussion will truly represent how genius he really was. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is one of the great odes that John Keats wrote in 1819 and is perhaps Keats's most famous poem. All the odes treat the relation of human mortality to something eternal, the eternal having some relation to the durability of art. Keats's odes are in the tradition of William Wordsworth's great Intimations Ode, which was also the great model for some of Percy Bysshe Shelley's greatest lyrics (Vendler, 56 - 99).

Keats spent a lot of time in the British Museum, and in other exhibitions of ancient art; in particular, he was struck by the Elgin Marbles (the Parthenon friezes and sculptures that Lord Elgin had arranged to bring to England, an appropriation of Greek heritage that continues to be a source of irritation between the Greek and the British governments). It is thought that the urn of Keats's title was included among the artifacts accompanying the original display of the Elgin Marbles. However, no particular urn has been successfully identified as the one that Keats is referring to, and it is doubtful that he had a particular one in mind. Rather, his imaginary urn was a sort of symbol for the great art of antiquity, art that had lasted long enough for its relationship to time to be vividly different from that of a mortal human being.

This ode ends with the resonant and justly famous but difficult lines: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." The urn points this moral, but what exactly is the moral? The example of beauty the poem considers is, of course, the urn itself, and the possible truth that the poem utters is the moral: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. ...