Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty? - Scientific American Scientific American Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty? How Keats's famous line applies to math and science By Martin Gardner on April 1, 2007 by Ian Stewart Basic Books, 2007 The title of Ian Stewart's book (he has written more than 60 others) is, of course, taken from the enigmatic last two lines of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. But what on earth did Keats mean? T. S. Eliot called the lines "meaningless" and "a serious blemish on a beautiful poem." John Simon opened a movie review with "one of the greatest problems of art--perhaps the greatest--is that truth is not beauty, beauty not truth. Nor is it all we need to know." Stewart, a distinguished mathematician at the University of Warwick in England and a former author of this magazine's Mathematical Recreations column, is concerned with how Keats's lines apply to mathematics. "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," Edna St.

Vincent Millay wrote. To mathematicians, great theorems and great proofs, such as Euclid's elegant proof of the infinity of primes, have about them what Bertrand Russell described as "a beauty cold and austere," akin to the beauty of great works of sculpture. Stewart's first 10 chapters, written in his usual easygoing style, constitute a veritable history of mathematics, with an emphasis on the concept of symmetry. When you perform an operation on a mathematical object, such that after the operation it looks the same, you have uncovered a symmetry. A simple operation is rotation. No matter how you turn a tennis ball, it does not alter the ball's appearance. It is said to have rotational symmetry. Capital "H" has 180-degree rotational symmetry because it is unchanged when turned upside down. It also has mirror reflection symmetry because it looks the same in a mirror. A swastika has 90-degree rotational symmetry but lacks mirror reflection symmetry because its mirror image whirls the other way. Associated with every kind of symmetry is a "group." Stewart explains the group concept in a simple way by considering operations on an equilateral triangle.

Rotate it 60 degrees in either direction, and it looks the same. Every operation has an "inverse," that cancels the operation. Imagine the corners of the triangle labeled A, B and C. A 60-degree clockwise rotation alters the corners' positions. If this is followed by a similar rotation the other way, the original positions are restored. If you do nothing to the triangle, this is called the "identity" operation. The set of all symmetry transformations of the triangle constitutes its group. Stewart's history begins with Babylonian and Greek mathematics, introducing their basic concepts in ways a junior high school student can understand. As his history proceeds, the math slowly becomes more technical, especially when he gets to complex numbers and their offspring, the quaternions and octonions. The history ends with the discoveries of Sophus Lie, for whom Lie groups are named, and the work of a little-known German mathematician, Joseph Killing, who classified Lie groups. Through this historical section, Stewart skillfully interweaves the math with colorful sketches of the lives of the mathematicians involved. Not until the book's second half does Stewart turn to physics and explain how symmetry and group theory became necessary tools.

A chapter on Albert Einstein is a wonderful blend of elementary relativity and details of Einstein's life. Next comes quantum mechanics and particle theory, with several pages on superstrings, the hottest topic in today's theoretical physics. Stewart is a bit skeptical of string theory, which sees all fundamental particles as inconceivably tiny filaments of vibrating energy that can be open-ended or closed like a rubber band. He does not mention two recent books (reviewed in the September 2006 issue of Scientific American) that give string theory a severe bashing. Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics denounces string theory as "not a theory at all," only a mishmash of bizarre speculations in search of a viable theory. Peter Woit's book is entitled Not Even Wrong, a quote from the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He once described a theory as so bad it was "not even wrong." [break] Is string theory beautiful? Its promoters think so. Smolin and Woit believe that its recent absorption into a richer conjecture called M-theory has turned the former beauty of strings into mathematical structures as ugly as the epicycles Ptolemy invented to explain the orbits of planets as they circle the earth.

We are back to the mystery of Keats's notorious lines. In my opinion, John Simon is right. Even beautiful mathematical proofs can be wrong. In 1879 Sir Alfred Kempe published a proof of the four-color map theorem. It was so elegant that for 10 years it was accepted as sound. Alas, it was not. Henry Dude?ney, England's great puzzle maker, published a much shorter and even prettier false proof. In The New Ambidextrous Universe I write about the vortex theory of atoms. This popular 19th-century conjecture had an uncanny resemblance to superstrings. It maintained that atoms are not pointlike but are incredibly tiny loops of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. They are minute whirlpools in the ether, a rigid, frictionless substance then believed to permeate all space. The atoms have the structure of knots and links, their shapes and vibrations generating the properties of all the elements. Once created by the Almighty, they last forever. In researching vortex theory, I came across many statements by eminent physicists, including Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, suggesting that vortex theory was far too beautiful not to be true.

Papers on the topic proliferated, books about it were published. Scottish mathematician Peter Tait's work on vortex atoms led to advances in knot theory. Tait predicted it would take several generations to develop the theory's mathematical foundations. Beautiful though it seemed, the vortex theory proved to be a glorious road that led nowhere. Stewart concludes his book with two maxims. The first: "In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps." The second: "In mathematics beauty must be true--because anything false is ugly." I agree with the first statement, but not the second. We have seen how lovely proofs by Kempe and Dudeney were flawed. Moreover, there are simply stated theorems for which ugly proofs may be the only ones possible. Let me cite two recent examples. Proof of the four-color map theorem required a computer printout so vast and dense that it could be checked only by other computer programs. Although there may be a beautiful proof recorded in what Paul Erd?s called "God's book"--a book that, he suggested, included all the theorems of mathematics and their most beautiful proofs--it is possible that God's book contains no such proof.

The same goes for Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. It is not computer-based, but it is much too long and complicated to be called beautiful. There may be no beautiful proof for this theorem. Of course, mathematicians can always hope and believe otherwise. Because symmetry is the glue and tape that binds the pages of Stewart's admirable history, a stanza from Lewis Carroll's immortal nonsense ballad The Hunting of the Snark could serve as an epigraph for the book: You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view-- To preserve its symmetrical shape. Advertisement | Report Ad ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Martin Gardner wrote Scientific American's Mathematical Games column for 25 years. His latest book, The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, was published last year by W. W. Norton. BeautyIsTruth Beauty Is Truth What's this bit about "beauty is truth"? Is it true--or is is just poetry? It's from a poem, "Ode On A Grecian Urn," written by John Keats in May, 1819, when he was about 24.

The urn is apparently decorated with a picture of a youth playing a flute in a pastoral setting and a young man chasing a young woman around the urn. She may well wish him to catch her--but the important thing is that on the urn, the music is silent and the chase, perpetual. And of course, it's worth remembering here that the function of an urn is to hold for eternity the ashes of the dead. The poem begins with some questions about the figures pictured on the urn, then moves to this statement: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter. . . . / Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. . . . / Forever wilt thou love and she be fair!" The poem ends with these lines, apparently addressed to the urn itself: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The words in question--"beauty is truth"--appear to be uttered by the urn, as if it were some sort of oracle--or maybe in the way a shell speaks for the sea when you hold it to your ear. Unfortunately, the quotation marks appeared in the first published edition, in 1820, but not in any of five other reproductions of the poem made in that year. So no one seems to know now whether the quoted words are spoken by the urn and the rest by Keats or a persona, or whether the persona speaks all of the words. Nor is there much agreement as to whether the lines express a universal truth--or are just poetic blather. Keats himself apparently never explained his intentions. He died of tuberculosis in 1821, only about eight years after beginning his career as a poet. The portrait below was made shortly before he died.

Oh, one more thing: The predecessor to this web page is a sheet of paper on my college office door bearing a picture of a Grecian urn and the last two lines of Keats' poem--"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." There's also my own question, "Is this so--or is it just poetry?" I taped the paper to my door around 1990, after learning that several of my English department colleagues had lied to destroy another teacher's reputation and had falsified official college records and perjured themselves in a lawsuit. Over the years the paper has been on my door, a number of persons have added their own comments, some ugly, some lovely. My favorite of all is one where the contributor crossed out my word "poetry" and wrote in "pottery." Terrific! (You know, beauty is skin deep, but lovely comes from the heart. How could it be other than true?) Several other notable personages have made pronouncements about truth and beauty. Here are a few I've found interesting or amusing. First, let's have a few equations that may be axiomatic: Beauty (yes???

if so, what about the others?) Next, a conundrum of sorts: "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound statement." --Niels Bohr (Laurence J. Peter, Peter's Quotations, New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1977, 500.) Compare that with this, which I heard in an episode of the PBS biography of Robert Oppenheimer. (I'm not positive I've got it verbatim, but pretty sure of the terms"shallow" and "deep." ) SHALLOW TRUTH--has as its contrary that the opposite is false. DEEP TRUTH--when true has an opposite which may also at least in part be true. Bohr and Oppenheimer were physicists. Their work was important in developing the atomic bomb. : Beauty Is Truth Truth Beauty Beauty Is Truth Truth Beauty What do these lines mean? "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"-that is all Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Are they spoken by the narrator or the urn?

Asked on gbeatty | College Teacher | (Level 1) Educator Emeritus Posted on March 19, 2007 at 10:45 PM The urn speaks these lines to mankind. They address an age old philosophical question: what is truth? The lines mean that rather than seeking the answer to this question in pure reason, we should seek it in beauty: that beauty is the truest thing humanity can experience. like 5 dislike 0 e-martin | College Teacher | (Level 1) Educator Emeritus Posted on In brief: Art has the power to communicate the truth of human experience. * The line in question is somewhat difficult to explicate, but when taken in context of the rest of the poem, Keats seems to be suggesting that the urn presents a set of messages. Taken together these messages can be identified as truth -- or the conclusive notions taken away from images of life that function as a comment on the nature of that life. One way to paraphrase the line "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is to say that art conveys human knowledge and insights better than any other conveyance of meaning (better than science, perhaps, or better than music).

The urn, after all, is depicting human life in various stages and engaged in various tasks. Youth and joy and sacrifice and, thus, religion are all represented. Furthermore, these ideas are presented in such a way as to maintain their mystery and their enigmatic significance. None of the magic of these aspects of life is lost when represented on the urn. A repeated suggestion in the poem is that by not speaking and by maintaining an allegiance with silence, the urn is capable of articulating both the substance of life and its more mysterious nature. Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme Thus a connection is implied that the urn, an example of beauty/art, is uniquely capable of expressing the "flowery tale" of human life. As to who "speaks" the line about beauty, Keats seems to be offering a voice to the urn at this point. The poet "speaks" the line but does so in a way that he is standing in for the urn and uttering the message that he feels the urn has to offer man.

Philosophy, Beauty and Truth The True Philosophy of Beauty Philosophy, Beauty, and Truth are unrelated according to the modern view of the world. When the poet Keats wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" – That is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know. Most people assume that what is being said is at best charming and sentimental, but ultimately meaningless in terms of real philosophy. In the "real world" of "scientific fact", philosophy, beauty, and truth have no relation to each other. However, Keats's words are precisely orthodox in terms of Platonic thought, of Vedic or Taoist thought. Indeed of all the traditional thinking of humanity. When Plato refers to the Absolute as to kalon, the Beautiful, he is making a statement that logically entails that of the poet – that Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty. So why is this interrelation of philosophy, beauty, and truth so alien to the modern mind? The answer lies in two radically opposed theories of what beauty is. According to the materialist doctrine, human beings are merely animals and the world is a mere accident of physics and biology. Nothing exists beyond the material and tangible. Science is a method based upon the strict consideration only of material things.

This is perfectly legitimate, just as it is legitimate for plane geometry to confine itself to two dimensions. If plane geometry were to deny the third dimension it would be stepping outside its defined area and making statements that were inherently absurd. Similarly, if scientists were to declare that nothing beyond the material can exist, they would be stepping outside their sphere and giving voice to what is – within the very terms of their discipline – absurd and illegitimate. And of course science does not do this. But many ill-educated people who treat science as a sort of pseudo-religion do think this way. And to a large extent the thinking of the modern world is based on this pseudo-scientific superstition of a purely-material world. What has this to do with the philosophy of beauty? Philosophy, Beauty, and Truth continues after break Simply this. If there is nothing beyond the material, then beauty can be nothing more than the subjective perception of human individuals. The very name of the modern so-called "philosophy of beauty" presupposes this. It is called aesthetics – the study of feeling (an an-aesthetic is what we have to stop us feeling something). As Ananda Coomaraswamy has said, aesthetics is the mere study of human irritability.

To the traditional philosophy beauty is not a mere human feeling. Feeling is simply a reaction to beauty. Beauty exists before we feel it and independently of whether we feel it or not. As Miss Alice Lucy Trent says: ...let us pause and consider the possibility that beauty is not a relative human perception, but an objective reality. That, indeed, Beauty is a cosmic reality that characterizes all sorts of different things – a flower, a star, a song, an angel – just as surely as hotness characterizes a sun and a fire, or wetness an ocean and a drop of dew. We should be grateful if you would pause for just a moment in reading this page, and think about this most important concept – that beauty is a cosmic reality, not merely a human perception. That beauty is as objectively real as heat or light or weight. Because if, even for a moment, even partially, you can let this truth take hold of you, you will have broken one of the chains that bind you, and will have seen a glimpse of the cosmos as it really is. From The Feminine Universe — Chapter IV Every beautiful thing in creation is beautiful because it shares, to some degree, in the Absolute Beauty which is Dea.

The Philosophy of Beauty (as opposed to mere aesthetics) teaches us that Beauty and Truth are one. Why Beauty and Truth? Because according to traditional philosophy Beauty is the aspect of the Absolute that we perceive through love while Truth is the aspect of the Absolute that we perceive through Intelligence. Intelligence, is not mere reason (which simply manipulates and organizes the information of the five senses) but the means by which the contemplative may see things that lie beyond the material. Traditional thought always speaks of two paths to God, or to the Absolute: jnana marga – the Path of Light, or Intelligence and bhakti marga the Path of Love. Now the Object of Intelligence is Truth and the Object of Love is Beauty. And the ultimate Truth and the ultimate Beauty are One and the same – the Absolute. Thus, as we are taught by true philosophy Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty. And while that may not be all we know, our other knowledge belongs in the sphere of contingent things – things that might or might not be. In the sphere, in fact, that is currently called "science". For the serious scientist knows that science can never speak of what is, only of what is probable.

So, as we know from our philosophy, Beauty and Truth are the only things we can truly Know. The Path of Love and the Path of Light are our only ways to the knowledge of That which Is rather than the shifting flux of material things. The Philosophy of Beauty is thus one half of the most fundamental philosophy of all. See also: Cosmetic Philosophy : The Metaphysics of Beauty The Philosophy of Makeup : The relevance of feminine Cosmetic Philosophy to actual cosmetics! Please Support the Chapel of Our Mother God Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats - Analysis Contact Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats Written in 1819, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ was the third of the five ‘great odes’ of 1819, which are generally believed to have been written in the following order – Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Autumn. Of the five, Grecian Urn and Melancholy are merely dated ‘1819’. Critics have used vague references in Keats’s letters as well as thematic progression to assign order.

(‘Ode on Indolence’, though written in March 1819, perhaps before Grecian Urn, is not considered one of the ‘great odes’.) This ode contains the most discussed two lines in all of Keats’s poetry – ‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ The exact meaning of those lines is disputed by everyone; no less a critic than TS Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem. Scholars have been unable to agree to whom the last thirteen lines of the poem are addressed. Arguments can be made for any of the four most obvious possibilities, -poet to reader, urn to reader, poet to urn, poet to figures on the urn. The issue is further confused by the change in quotation marks between the original manuscript copy of the ode and the 1820 published edition. (This issue is further discussed at the bottom of this page.) Crop from George Keats’s manuscript copy of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ You can view part of the earliest known manuscript below.

Please note that it is a transcription in George Keats’s handwriting; Keats’s original manuscript / first draft is lost. Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs!

that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Note: In 1997, Dennis Dean published an article in the Philological Quarterly titled ‘Some Quotations in Keats’s Poetry’. In it, he discussed the problem of the final quotation, linking it with the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. I think it reasonably settles the ‘quotation issue’: “In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats will say exactly the same thing, more elegantly but more cryptically also: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”–surely the most famous equation in English literature and precisely correct in suggesting the Newtonian origin of the unstated “proof.” Many readers of Annals of the Fine Arts would probably have recognized the source of Keats’s equation in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds because of their familiarity with Reynolds and because the whole technique of allusion (or even short quotation) was fundamental to the neoclassicism in which both Reynolds and his readers had been educated.

In the second published version of 1820, moreover, Keats represents this portion, and this portion only, of the urn’s utterance as a quotation–but as a quotation within a quotation. If one were free to punctuate the final pair of lines in the “Ode” according to present-day editorial practice, they would (in my view) look like this: “‘Beauty is truth; truth, beauty’–that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua (for Keats and his readers, the world’s greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn. Because of the uniformity of human minds and passions, moreover, the figures inscribed on the urn (which puzzle the observer at first glance) become intelligible as we relate them to our own experience. The first stanza of the poem is filled with questions; the last, with none.

Being art, the urn retains its ability to “speak” to all who observe it, reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time.” Source: ‘Some Quotations in Keats’s Poetry’ by Dennis R. Dean. From the Philological Quarterly. Volume: 76. Issue: 1, 1997. Read More English History Topics Link/cite this page If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content. Hanson, Marilee. "Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats" <a href=""> February 1, 2015 Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn Poem by John Keats" , February 1, 2015 More from Keats Explanation and Analysis of “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats Home » Literature » Poetry » Explanation and Analysis of “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats Explanation and Analysis of “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats Posted by Nicole Smith , Dec 7, 2011 Poetry Comments Closed Print The poem by John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is one of the most memorable and enduring of all the poems to come from the Romantic Period . “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is notable for its profound meditation and persuasive conclusions about the nature of beauty, particularly as beauty is portrayed in artistic media. The meaning of the poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats conveys, perhaps paradoxically, the “speechlessness of the true language of art” (Klaus 251).

In doing so, it demonstrates “the most universal power [of all nineteenth-century poets] to move readers in our own time” (Bloom & Trilling 494). This effect is achieved through the cohesive development of the meaning of the entire poem, but is especially concentrated in the concluding lines that have become so well-loved and often recited: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (ll. 49-50). In these two seemingly simple lines, Keats conveys his entire philosophy about art, beauty, and life to the reader so that he or she can offer an interpretation. While it should be noted that these concluding lines of the poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn” frequently appear alone, the true meaning of them is not lost without the rest of the poem to compliment them, but the gravity of what Keats is trying to suggest is certainly diminished. It makes sense, structurally speaking, that the stanzas of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which precede these two closing lines build up, both thematically and formally, to the assertive declaration made by the speaker.

After spending four full stanzas, each of ten lines, contemplating the characteristics of the Grecian urn in careful detail, the speaker, Keats himself, answers the ten questions that he has posed earlier in the poem with the simply and directly worded phrase, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’” (l. 49). This part of the final two lines is compelling for a number of reasons. First, its apparent simplicity belies its latent symbolic meaning. One of the first superficial qualities that the reader notices in this phrase is the economy of language that characterizes this part of the line. Keats avoids extraneous words, such as an “and” to connect the two parts of the statement, and a second “is.” Instead, he favors a pared down, streamlined statement that is facilitates easy recall and repetition. When compared to the rest of this poem from the Romantic Period , particularly in terms of language and form, these final lines strike the reader, not only because of what they mean, but because there has been a formal attempt to attract the reader’s attention through structure. The poetic phrase, then, becomes a maxim that can move beyond the poem and circulate in a wider social and artistic dialogue.

As Bloom and Trilling observe, the enduring popularity of this poem seems to suggest that the maxim has a certain timelessness and universal appeal about it as well (494). When offering a summary of the poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats and attempting to discern the meaning of the poem, the reader must move farther into the poem. The second part of the line—“that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (ll. 49-50)—also seems simple enough but is one of the important quotes from “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats. First, it is important to point out that this part of this important line from “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is divided from the first by a hyphen, which forces the reader to pause between the two interrelated conclusions Keats wishes to convey to the reader.

The fact that the first part of the line is also enclosed within quotation marks, as if it came from a source outside the poem itself, and the fact that this second part of the line is not, also calls the reader’s attention to the matter of differences and similarities in the concluding lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” While —“that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (ll. 49-50) is more verbose than the “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’” (l. 49) sentiment, its parallel construction helps reinforce the lesson it contains. The parallel construction also serves to imitate the similar construction of the first part of the line. The repetitive structure of both components of these last two lines is an important formal poetic device. The fact that this repetition occurs at the end of the poem, and not at any other point—at least not in quite the same way—earlier in the ode also underscores that Keats expected the reader to take away a particular message from the poem. The repetition makes the message memorable and transportable.

In addition, again this is a direct effort to engage the reader at the end of the poem and through this repetition, reinforce the point and perhaps give one cause to go back up and reread previous stanzas with a fresh eye now that the poet’s message seems clearer. While this is certainly speculation on why Keats chose this structure and closing lines, it did have this effect after reading it several times through each time. Moving to a deeper analytic level, however, yields even more compelling observations about these apparently simple, almost sing-songy lines. Beyond functioning effectively as a formal poetic device, the parallel construction of both parts of the lines reveals two paradoxes Keats wishes the reader to consider. Upon a second reading and a reconsideration of these beguilingly easy lines, the reader might notice that Keats might not mean what he is saying at all. At this interpretive level, the poem yields up at least one alternate meaning. If the reader understands the lines “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’” (l. 49) on a level that is only superficial, then he or she might react the lines with admiring and assenting sentiment.

However, if one studies the lines beyond and beneath the first impression that they evoke, the paradoxes become evident. These lines, as is true of the poem itself, must be considered within the broader historical context of the Romantic movement. The lines must also be considered against the knowledge of Keats’s own concerns and precoccupations. When this information is considered alongside a reading of the poem, then it is possible that the reader may react and respond very differently to these lines, which seemed so optimistic and positive on the first reading. In fact, this second reading, in which the paradoxes are identified and considered, may provoke a sense of existential despair in the reader. Keats is suggesting that beauty can only truly exist in an artificial state, such as on the frozen, immutable, lifeless form of the Grecian urn. Such an argument may raise a number of provocative and uncomfortable questions. The reader may ask, What is the reason for living, then? Why continue to pursue and attempt to create and define beauty? One may even ask, Why go on living? Beauty is so central to humans’ most cherished beliefs and pursuits, that Keats’s forceful lines seem to challenge important aspects of our very selves.

Once the reader moves beyond this reaction, though, it becomes possible to see that Keats’s truth is liberating. If humans no longer need to strive to create the perfect beautiful form in whatever medium, then it frees them to be imperfect. Imperfection, in turn, liberates humans to make and remake art, and to recognize that one form dies with each individual death, and is then born again with each new birth– a common theme in poetry from the Romantic period. Bloom and Trilling refer to this realization as Keats’s “gift of tragic acceptance” (495), which the poet hands to the reader and urges him or her to accept and then contemplate. Such tragic acceptance did not cause pain or persistent despair for Keats, nor should it cause such feelings in the reader, although it might evoke a temporary sense of “unbearable ecstasy” (Mitrani 102). This ecstasy, though, is itself paradoxical because it is, eventually, bearable. In fact, this ecstasy is at the root of the perpetual “aesthetic conflict” identified by psychoanalysts (Mitrani 102), a subject which has also preoccupied poets and artists since the beginning of human attempts at artistic expression.

The aesthetic conflict, as it is represented by Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is this: the art object does not reflect reality as we experience it. In fact, the art object cannot reflect reality as we experience it. The art object only reflects ideals, ideals which are never achievable in real life. Keats describes the beautiful urn by sharing his detailed observations, noting its decorations and conveying its scenes to the reader. The urn is made of marble, a precious material, and it is etched with carvings of sacred gods. By referring to the mythological heroes of the past, Keats evokes a particular nostalgia for the supposed perfection of the preceding ages, a nostalgia which will be contested and then swept away in the declarative concluding lines. The overall sense, at least until the concluding stanza, suggests a feeling of pleasure, bliss, and eternity, rather than of death. At the end of the poem, though, Keats returns himself—and the reader—to reality by noting that the world is a “Cold Pastoral!” (l. 45). The eternity initially suggested by the urn exists only artistically; it does not reflect life, which is not eternal.

This is the aesthetic conflict Keats provokes and also resolves in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” These paradoxes suggest that the urn discloses a particular truth to man. The urn’s truth lies in its beauty. Yet that truth is that perfect beauty can only exist as it does on the urn: captured, frozen, artificial. The beauty in this truth is that we do not have to strive for perfection, then, because it is not possible for mortals. It was only possible in a world populated by deities. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, then, is a journey into the interior of Keats’s mind and the soul, as well as a disclosure of his most closely held beliefs. The poet uses an external object, a Grecian urn, to provoke the reader to contemplate the same aesthetic conflict which has preoccupied him and his fellow Romantic poets so deeply. This particular ode, among all of his oeuvre, shows Keats in a particularly contemplative state. His observations of the urn have provoked considerations about the nature of truth, beauty, and the function of art, all of which were the primary concerns of the Romantic poets .

While the urn keeps the reader grounded in the realities of the outside world, the reader is a companion to the poet, who manipulates extreme emotions and ultimately concludes that life can only be captured by living it experientially, not trying to replicate it in art forms. The ultimate irony, of course, is that Keats uses one art form, the poem, and specifically, the ode, to achieve the transmission of this artistic philosophy. John Keats Quotes - BrainyQuote John Keats Quotes Find on Amazon: John Keats Cite this Page: Citation Keats and the Supermodels: The Truth About Beauty | Observer Keats and the Supermodels: The Truth About Beauty By Ron Rosenbaum • 10/11/99 12:00am Is Truth Beauty? Is Beauty Truth? Sometimes it’s useful to be reminded that what passes for eternal wisdom may not have the unshakable foundation that mere rote repetition has endowed it with. Consider the equation of Truth and Beauty that appears in John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance.

A thought-provoking essay by Harvard University professor Marjorie Garber in the summer 1999 issue of Critical Inquiry argues for a re-examination of the casual equation of Beauty and Truth–at least of the way it’s employed in the popular media and vernacular culture (as, for instance, in the insanely overrated American Beauty , a film whose shallow satire of suburban values proclaims in a self-congratulatory way that Beauty is the highest Truth in life.) At the very least Professor Garber reopens a long-simmering debate in literary studies over whether Keats himself, the author of the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” meant it as a summation of Wisdom, or in some way ironically . You probably recall at least vaguely Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It’s about an icon of art, an urn that depicts on its surface scenes of erotic pursuit, frozen longing, unconsummated seduction, unheard music and unexecuted ritual sacrifice. But it’s become an icon of art itself, not just the urn but the poem about the urn.

For Cleanth Brooks, author of The Well-Wrought Urn , an attempt to define poetry that was extremely influential for a half-century after its publication in the 30’s, the image of the urn embodies what a poem is, “a verbal icon,” as Brooks’ colleague William Wimsatt called it. It’s an image Herman Melville responded to in his poem about a shattered urn, “The Ravaged Villa” (for Melville, truth is shattered beauty, shards of God). That image of a shattered urn, Vladimir Nabokov discloses in a penciled marginal note, preoccupied him during the composition of Ada . (See my Nabokov essay “In the Nabokov Archives,” Nov. 24, 1997.) “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an attempt to reconcile the often oppositional character of the truth and beauty pairing in Western thought, the tendency to see beauty as a seductive distraction from truth, to see beauty as a lovely lie, a temptation to sin. The controversy over Keats’ “Urn” focuses on the famous final stanza.

When, after several stanzas describing and inquiring about the scenes depicted on the urn, marveling on the way the frozen delicacy of the scenes keeps the figures therein “Forever panting, and forever young/ All breathing human passion far above,” the poet then addresses the urn itself: … Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”–that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Take a look at those quotation marks–the ones around “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” They are the focus of the controversy Professor Garber reopens in Critical Inquiry .

It’s part of a thoughtful piece entitled–this should be fun for copy editors–” ” ” (Quotation Marks).” It’s an essay that ranges from Representative Henry Hyde’s quotation-saturated Clinton impeachment address to the typographical origins of quotation marks in 17th-century English as “inverted commas,” through the questions raised by the contemporary phrase “quote unquote” and the rise of the finger-wagging “air quotes” and the ways in which we use quote marks in the attempt to signal both irony and authenticity. In the midst of this, Ms. Garber revisits perhaps the most notorious and difficult debate over quotation marks in English literature, the one over “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Who says that? Keats? The urn? Should the quotation marks end after “beauty”–in which case, is the rest of the last two lines–”That is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”–a comment, perhaps ironic, on the urn’s equation of truth and beauty? By placing “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” inside quotes, is Keats distancing himself at least somewhat from the sentiment–examining it critically or ironically?

Could Keats even be denying the certainty, the “truth,” that beauty is truth? Or is this potential irony just an artifact of mistaken punctuation , a late and erroneous imposition of quotation marks that Keats never intended? Which would mean that the entire last two lines are “spoken” (note the need to use ironic quotes) by the urn (which, of course, is necessarily silent and therefore ventriloquized by Keats). In which case, was the urn itself being ironic about the equation of truth and beauty? Was the urn implying that “Beauty is truth,” is not necessarily the ultimate truth but all you need to know, all you can tolerate on earth? Is Keats or Keats’ urn saying it’s all you need to know because it knows more? Because, as Jack Nicholson put it, You can’t handle the truth? The question about the placement of the quotation marks, and thus about the value the poet wishes to endow the “beauty is truth” equation with, was raised by the unsettled history of Keats manuscripts of the poem. In the first three transcripts of the poem, there are no quotation marks at all.

The urn “sayst,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all ye know …” without setting off those first five words in quotes. The question arises from the fact that in the final, published edition of the poems, quotes have been added around “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and Keats himself is said to have seen that final edition through publication. The problem is complicated by the fact that we don’t know for sure if the addition of the quotation marks was something Keats did, an addition by an editor which he accepted, or, if he did add them himself, whether he was making a slight but important revision of how he wanted “Beauty is truth …” to be taken, distancing himself from the beauty-truth aphorism. Or was he making more explicit something he already thought? I love this kind of literary controversy, in which momentous questions of meaning in literature and art depend upon unresolvable or undecidable textual and historical ambiguities.

Jack Stillinger, the most widely respected recent editor of Keats’ complete poems, offers no less than four “most frequently mentioned possibilities” when it comes to deciding just who is saying “Beauty is truth” to whom in the last two lines of Keats’ “Urn”: “(1) poet to reader, (2) poet to urn, (3) poet to figures on the urn, (4) urn to reader.” To which I would add: (5) urn to “man” as opposed to reader–the reader is listening to the urn say it to “man,” but is not necessarily the addressee. But, Mr. Stillinger added, “serious objections have been raised to all four” of the possibilities he mentions, and those four don’t even begin to conjure up the complications which arise when one has to consider what part of the last two lines–the “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” part, or the entire last two lines–are spoken by the urn or by the poet, and to whom. So where lies the truth about Truth and Beauty? Is Beauty the truth about Truth, or a lie about Truth? “The ornament of beauty is suspect,” Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 70.

Beauty is suspect, transient, sickens like a cankered rose. Shouldn’t we suspect anyone–person, poet or urn–who worships it as truth? If, in fact, what’s going on in the poem, and the linkage between truth and beauty, isn’t intended to be ironized at some level. Marjorie Garber begins by quoting what she characterizes as the consensus wisdom on the question, from Helen Vendler, author of The Odes of John Keats , a brilliant study I’ve celebrated previously in these pages. Ms. Vendler argues that “The last two lines are spoken by the urn, which places special emphasis on the motto-like epigram [“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”] before going on to comment on its unique worth. But the whole last sentence of the poem [beginning with “When old age …”] is the sentence of the speaker who, in his prophecy, recounts what the urn will say to succeeding generations.” Professor Garber takes issue with both Professors Vendler and Stillinger over whether the crux is settled and it must be the urn speaking the entire last two lines.

She questions what it might mean if the quotation marks were removed or expanded, and whether the speaker might be commenting on the motto of the urn after quoting it. It should be noted, however, that the passage quoted from Professor Vendler doesn’t do justice to her usual superb exegesis of the ode and her argument that what Keats–and the urn–are doing is not defining truth as beauty, but redefining beauty as that which is truthful. Not “propositional truth,” Professor Vendler emphasizes, not logic, but the truth of representation, beauty as a kind of Higher Accuracy, I’d say. But speaking of accuracy, Professor Garber makes her most telling point when she summons up, presumably from a Truth-and-Beauty key-worded Lexis-Nexis search, the way the aphorism is misrepresented and misused in the common parlance of our culture, the way all the potential ambiguities are collapsed into a simple-minded singularity. Here are some of the examples she came up with: From a scientific report about the waist-to-hip ration in the human species: “Beauty is truth and truth beauty,” to quote John Keats. But what is the truth about beauty?

A scientific investigation of what men find beautiful in a woman’s shape suggests that concepts of beauty have more to do with Western influences than what comes as an inbuilt, or innate, desire. From an article about fall foliage in New England: “Beauty is truth–truth beauty–that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” –John Keats By now anyone who has passed more than a few autumns in New Hampshire knows why the state’s fall foliage is colored so flagrantly. Lead sentence in a New York Times Arts and Leisure article about the merits of live-performance recording: According to John Keats, beauty is truth, and vice versa. Some recording artists disagree. Headline in The New York Times, drawing attention to “a new Israeli esthetic along the Mediterranean”: The Secular Jew: Beauty Is Truth: That Is All the Stylish Need to Know Headline of an editorial about the National Endowment for the Arts: Beauty Is Truth: Government Has a Role in Nurturing the Arts Headline for a Los Angeles Times column: If Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty, That’s Not All We Need to Know Today: What’s “Telegenic”?

And, somewhat ironically in view of subsequent developments, this opening paragraph from a 1983 piece in The New York Times : John Keats wrote that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” But is that all we need to know about Vanessa Williams, the new Miss America? It’s kind of destabilizing, isn’t it, trying to track just what is being said about beauty and truth in all those truth-and-beauty allusions and the copy that follows. But if one could generalize, one might say that they all seem to have adopted what might be called the Supermodel Interpretation of Keats: Beauty defines truth, rather than truth defines beauty. And beauty is defined as prettiness or attractiveness. Setting aside the fact that in none of these quotations is it acknowledged that John Keats himself never “says” beauty is truth–the question of who says how much is shrouded in ambiguity–the general (and mistaken) tenor of all these quotes is that whatever is beautiful must be truthful.

Or, as Fernando used to say on Saturday Night Live : “Better to look good than to feel good, baby.” Yes, you could argue that the aphorism is about the beauty of Art rather than the beauty of Vogue . That the poem or the urn is arguing for what Percy Bysshe Shelley called “Intellectual Beauty.” Not prettiness, but fidelity to the Reality of Being. But then you’re forced into the position of calling, say, Shoah , Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust documentary, “beautiful.” Beauty is truth only if, in some ultimately Pollyanna-ish way, you believe creation, history and human nature are beautiful. What if they’re ugly in an artless way? Still, the Supermodel Theory of Beauty is not without distinguished defenders. In his “Hymne of Heavenly Beautie,” the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser argued that the contemplation of world beauty–supermodel beauty, we might say for shorthand–is not to be utterly dismissed because it can ultimately stir the hearts of men to: … lift themselves up hyer, And learne to love with zealous humble dewty Th’eternall fountaine of that heavenly beauty.

Spenser, of course, is echoing the Platonic vision of the ennobling role of worldly beauty, which was also used to rationalize Socrates’ pursuit of the young boys who were, in effect, the supermodels of ancient Athens. But it seems to me that Keats’ final lines in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are less an echo of Plato than an argument with Hamlet. That the “Beauty is truth” aphorism is an explicit response to a passage in which Hamlet and Ophelia argue about the relationship between honesty and beauty. It’s an exchange that takes place shortly after the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in what is generally known as “the nunnery scene.” “If you be honest and fair,” Hamlet says to Ophelia, “your honesty would admit no discourse to your beauty.” “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?” she asks, taking what will later be the Keatsian position.

“Ay truly,” Hamlet replies, it could do better, it’s better to separate truth and beauty, “for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness; this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” Two centuries pass, and John Keats attempts to give that paradox a disproof, to displace it with a superseding paradox. Beauty doesn’t transform honesty to a bawd; beauty is honesty. Truth makes beauty truthful, and beauty makes truth beautiful. I don’t know, but lately I find myself leaning towards Hamlet’s side of the argument rather than Keat’s. (Although I think Keats himself was a bit of a Hamlet on the question.) I tend to feel that in telling us–the urn, mankind, whoever speaks it–that “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” he is suggesting there is something more to know, something you might be better off not knowing, but something that goes beyond the simple equation “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I just hope the supermodels won’t be upset at me for saying so.

Beauty is truth; truth beauty: revelations from John Keats - Aleph Beauty is truth; truth beauty: revelations from John Keats February 24, 2016 by Faena Aleph Posted in: Inspiration From the Greek urns that John Keats once saw in the British Museum emerged one of the most important English poems of the 19th century. A man standing in silence in a museum observes a Greek urn. From the urn comes the silent voice of the past. But it is not just any man that observes, and neither is it just any urn. It is the English poet John Keats , standing in a room of the British Museum in London, and the urn is a product of his imagination. According to Julio Cortázar, the urn that Keats writes about is an invention that sprang from the fusion of various Greek urns in the British Museum and others that the poet had seen in etchings by Piranesi . We have written evidence of what the urn inspired in Keats as, in 1819, he wrote one of his famous odes, “ On a Grecian Urn ”.

Keats was a keen visitor to the museum and knew it well, to the extent that he could recognize new pieces when they were added to the museum’s collection. His love for classical art and his spectacular imagination made the creation of this great poetic work possible. The ode to a Grecian urn is an ekphrasis (a detailed description of an object) The ekphrasis tradition has existed since Ancient Greece: one of the most famous is perhaps that referring to Achilles’s shield in The Iliad. The poem begins by giving human characteristics to the urn, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness”, “Thou foster-child of Silence and Slow time, Sylvan historian” (sylva, in Greek, means “forest”). The urn narrates, through the poet’s voice, the history of a people, portrayed in its marmoreal surface. Keats assures us that the urn, in all its silence, can better tell history than any human verse. The object contains legends of mortals and gods.

The artistic piece, the funerary urn (although the poet takes care to never mention the final use of the recipient), is a mirror of Greek history, of its myths, its peoples, but it is also a mirror of the poet’s mind. The treatment of time and memory in the poem are singular: the scene is frozen in time, like a photograph. The poet read in the urn what we read in his poem; time does not pass, at least not for those who are immortalized in art. The silent form, immune to old age, relates stories and melodies that are ‘ever new’ that invite the poet to be reflected in the urn – a silent witness to history – and to speak of themselves. To create an ekphrasis is to try to stop time, portray a second and make of an object something that will always last. In this way, the artist and the object of their art transcend. But, paradoxically, the figures of the urn will not achieve eternity without being inhuman. Keats closes the poem with the chiasmus: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

It is not clear if this phrase is said by the urn or by the poet. But in any case, facing the object itself, the poet is not talking about its visual value – of its form or its colors – but the fact that it transcends time and is capable of seeing, through language, what an object does not show at first sight and what only a poet can see in a funerary urn. The Greek urn talks, finally of the beauty of time and of the finite, as the lovers painted on it will never embrace; they are paused, about to touch each other, forever. . A man standing in silence in a museum observes a Greek urn. From the urn comes the silent voice of the past. But it is not just any man that observes, and neither is it just any urn. It is the English poet John Keats , standing in a room of the British Museum in London, and the urn is a product of his imagination. According to Julio Cortázar, the urn that Keats writes about is an invention that sprang from the fusion of various Greek urns in the British Museum and others that the poet had seen in etchings by Piranesi .

We have written evidence of what the urn inspired in Keats as, in 1819, he wrote one of his famous odes, “ On a Grecian Urn ”. Keats was a keen visitor to the museum and knew it well, to the extent that he could recognize new pieces when they were added to the museum’s collection. His love for classical art and his spectacular imagination made the creation of this great poetic work possible. The ode to a Grecian urn is an ekphrasis (a detailed description of an object) The ekphrasis tradition has existed since Ancient Greece: one of the most famous is perhaps that referring to Achilles’s shield in The Iliad. The poem begins by giving human characteristics to the urn, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness”, “Thou foster-child of Silence and Slow time, Sylvan historian” (sylva, in Greek, means “forest”). The urn narrates, through the poet’s voice, the history of a people, portrayed in its marmoreal surface. Keats assures us that the urn, in all its silence, can better tell history than any human verse. The object contains legends of mortals and gods.

The artistic piece, the funerary urn (although the poet takes care to never mention the final use of the recipient), is a mirror of Greek history, of its myths, its peoples, but it is also a mirror of the poet’s mind. The treatment of time and memory in the poem are singular: the scene is frozen in time, like a photograph. The poet read in the urn what we read in his poem; time does not pass, at least not for those who are immortalized in art. The silent form, immune to old age, relates stories and melodies that are ‘ever new’ that invite the poet to be reflected in the urn – a silent witness to history – and to speak of themselves. To create an ekphrasis is to try to stop time, portray a second and make of an object something that will always last. In this way, the artist and the object of their art transcend. But, paradoxically, the figures of the urn will not achieve eternity without being inhuman. Keats closes the poem with the chiasmus: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

It is not clear if this phrase is said by the urn or by the poet. But in any case, facing the object itself, the poet is not talking about its visual value – of its form or its colors – but the fact that it transcends time and is capable of seeing, through language, what an object does not show at first sight and what only a poet can see in a funerary urn. The Greek urn talks, finally of the beauty of time and of the finite, as the lovers painted on it will never embrace; they are paused, about to touch each other, forever. .

Question: Which poet wrote the line 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know'?
Answer: JOHN KEATS