Keats' Ode To A Grecian Urn

There is one main assessment of the sensuous beauty that is art in Keats' (1819) Ode to a Grecian Urn: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (2). Keats' aesthetic of art viewed art as having the capacity to capture the eternal and universal essence of life. In the sensuous beauty of art like the urn, one finds the essence of beauty and the essence of truth which are interchangeable. From the imagination of the artist springs beauty and truth, the essence of living, which the speaker informs us is all we can "know on earth" as well as "all we need to know" (Keats 1819, 2). Keats' aesthetic of manmade material objects stands in contrast to Wordsworth's focus on nature as the source of all we can know and all we need to know on earth. Keats' aesthetic also posits more capacity to know beauty and truth than does the aesthetic provided by Kant's (1795) Perpetual Peace, which puts limitations on human reason to know a "Higher Cause," as does Mary Shelley's (1992) Frankenstein. This analysis will compare Keats' aesthetic of art to those offered by Wordsworth, Kant, and Shelley.

In Ode, Keats attempts to make the case that the artistic imagination reveals beauty and, therefore, truth because the artistic imagination captures the essence of life frozen in time in art. We see this most clearly in Keats' depiction of the real life couple depicted on the urn with their depiction. Human bein

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