Keats and Ekphrasis

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Recommended: Critical analysis if keats's Ode on a Grician Urn

In John Keats’, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, there is an noticable emphasis on the ambiguity of this Ode when compared to the others Keats wrote at that time. “What are we to make of the tonal perplexity with which Ode on a Grecian Urn… begins…- since the performance of ekphrasis is supposed to exude a speaker’s confidence for the task?” (Kelley 172) Here, Theresa M. Kelley also debates, at first, the truth of the sonnet. In the Ode, the Urn is the object to visualize and the speaker is to absorb the object. It transfixes the speaker and transcends his thoughts, allowing him to sense what a baffling world it would be to mix the arts the, convulting pictorial art and written art and ultimately bewildering the narrators thoughts. Reviewer Klaus Hofmann establishes that “THE coalescense of life and art “ (Hofmann 264)

The Ode can be analysized through the breakdown of an element necessary- that is created by the sonnet-ekphrasis. Kelley’s definition is easiest to begin with as it creates room for a more detailed definiton, but leads the pathway to conclusion, which Hofmann explicates. “Ekphrasis: to speak out, to tell in full; an extended and detailed literary description of any object, real or imaginary.” (Kelley 170) The Ode is by definition ekphrasis. Here I want to engage in Kelley’s take on Keats’ “ekphrasis” while incorporating a second reading-other than my own- Klaus Hofmann’s egagement with the poem since it both defends my analysis and makes sense of Kelley’s, but his reading establishes the poem in a much more inventive way. Kelley’s immersion into ekphrasis, though generalized, in Ode on a Grecian Urn, is the occupation of “sister arts”-image and poetry- also incorporating history of “still” art that , in addition to the id...

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...ats’Odes, through analysis we established synthesis. What at first disconnects the poem, the silence and the world of movement, ultimately transcends into one, as does in history. Connecting the “sister-arts” succumbs to a spritual awakening, yet an epi[hany of sides. In this case it only reflects positive ideas: a still and silent world that will forever live on and a mortal world that will eventually end. But this is the idea Keats is trying to establish, “Truth Beatt beaty truth” once we overcome the idea overwhelming curiouslty of the parched tounge we feel towards the urn, -the idea of 9Osmeothing capability) once we get a taste of that world, we are too much delved into in that it only confuses our thoughts and as Hofmann says puts us in our three teirs of relams of realty and thus we have to get out and pick a place to stay and make peace with the others.

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