Lessons from a Grecian Urn

A timeless return to beauty

“Poetry… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most celebrated and well-known poems of the English language, and rightly so. However, it is arguably also one of the least understood—and rarely well-performed.

Unfortunately, the advent of twentieth century Modernism cast a cloud of obscurity over many works in the classical tradition. The classical—or timeless—tradition is typified by Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the works of the ancient Greeks like Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca and Virgil; and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Schiller, Shelley, Poe et al. Of course, we also have the countless Eastern masters, a timeless world all of its own (and also well-worth exploring).

In the twentieth century, many of the most compelling aspects and classic works like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were treated in a manner which Keats—and those he most identified with as a mature artist—would not recognize. In the terms of twentieth century “Modernism,” criticism and appreciation for a timeless piece of art like Keats’ ode became relegated to Modernist interpretations, including New Criticism’s “close reading.” Discussion of poetics became largely confined to an analysis of the ode’s “enigmatic” qualities, its novel word-choice, language and imagery—what we refer to as poetic “craft.”

Twentieth century New Criticism was outlined by writers such as John Crow Ransom and his related circles around The Fugitive literary magazine, based out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. However, “New Criticism” was not “new” in that it was rooted in the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats et al. “New Criticism” was the outgrowth of a Modernist outlook spread and championed by the leading Modernist poets of Europe and the Americas—with major repercussions on the art world until today.

In the manual, Twentieth Century Literary Theory—authored by K.M. Newton¹—the advent of New Criticism was described in the following manner:

Though the New Criticism had its origins in Britain in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, the theory of I. A. Richards and the practice of William Empson, its most powerful impact has been in America. John Crowe Ransom, who published a book entitled The New Criticism in 1941, was the leading American influence and he acknowledged a debt to Eliot and Richards.

K.M. Newton continues:

The fundamental aim of American New Criticism was to create a critical alternative to impressionism and historical scholarship […] It advocated ‘intrinsic’ criticism – an impersonal concern for the literary work as an independent object- and opposed ‘extrinsic’ critical approaches, which concerned themselves with such matters as authorial intention, historical, moral or political considerations, and audience response.

From the lens of New Criticism and related Modernist schools of thought, compelling and thought provoking ironies, which might “tease us out of thought” and lead us to some deeper insight about the nature of man and the universe, were reduced to a discussion of novel poetic effects, tropes and literary devices. Discussion was centered not on the quality or value of a poetical idea per se, and the language and imagery used to convey this idea by way of some new metaphorical expression or narrative. Instead, discussion was confined to strict analysis of poetic craft—as if the relationship between artistic craft and a poem’s underlying philosophy or worldview were simply a matter of taste or an altogether different question; as if one could separate the traces of ink left on the page from the poet’s thoughts themselves. Or as if ideas themselves were not subject to any kind of value judgement or criticism, only their superficial and outward characteristics.

Of course, a great poem must be finely crafted, but it must also be much more: a poem is a reflection of the universe inhabited by the poet. To restrict discussion of a poem to the question of craft alone is to ignore—wittingly or unwittingly—the investigation of what universe the poet places before us, the universe he/she inhabits and what this universe means for man. To ignore such questions is to abandon philosophy altogether—an attempt to separate Beauty from Truth, whose wedding is the ultimate aim of great art. Indeed, artists have throughout history been the consecrators of the sacred relationship between Truth and Beauty.

They remind us of man’s final end.

Under the guise of “New Criticism,” the great bards of the past would be paid lip service not on account of the beauty or truthfulness of their ideas in respect to “profound conceptions concerning man and nature”— as Shelley once described the poet’s great task²— or to capture the “wording of one's own highest thoughts” as Keats believed—they would be admired as skilled craftsmen, skilled in their ability to paint our imaginations with beautiful or intense images, regardless of Truth. Thus, a skilled craftsman could just as easily paint the portrait of a Jesus-loving Satanist or a love-making sadist and garner as much praise on account of their craft.

This may seem like a harmless approach. However, with any fundamental discussion of ideas stripped from the concept of poetry, it is not hard to imagine how art lost its moral tiller and sense of direction. Without any objective attempt to examine the our own deeper human nature, or how we might situate such questions in respect to humanity and its relationship to the world as whole, the idea of New Criticism defined a kind of amoral aesthetic. The result was a poisoning of the spirit zapping the vitality out of many souls who would have otherwise been excited about the prospect of discovering something true and meaningful in the universe, and that they too could have a part to play in its great unfolding drama.

Rather than craft beautiful tragedies that allowed mankind to play out the sad and ugly consequences of bad ideas on the stage rather than in real life, art itself became one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century—a tragedy whose essence was the condemnation of poetry and literature to an abyss of nihilism, academicism and hostility to any idea of Beauty, Truth and Goodness beyond the five senses i.e. the banishment of Plato and the timeless tradition of Classical wisdom.

Society became saturated with a nihilism, whose bitter effect remains palpable to this day. The view of human beings as endowed with a divine spark of creativity—a spark which every individual should be afforded a meaningful opportunity to develop—became increasingly rare. The idea of “meaning” and the importance of meaning became anathema to Modernism’s general aesthetic. As a result, a sense of meaning was lost not only in literature, but in society as a whole.

While many today decry how Western society’s laws are being fundamentally rewritten to fit the latest political agenda and culture narrative—however divorced from Truth—these latest aberrations ultimately have their roots in the earlier twentieth century perversions, beginning with taste and aesthetics i.e. the domain of the imagination.

From the world of cinema (which captured the imagination of entire generations) to the plastic arts displayed across museums and bustling city squares, all facets of the human imagination were led to new and questionable expressions. And this is the great truth of art—its power—that it is a fundamental expression of man’s image of himself and how he relates to the world.

From the salons of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to the Ku Klux Clan family-man John Crow Ransom and his Fugitives magazine, The Paris Review, Eliot’s Criterion and many other outlets, the Modernist ideal proliferated across the West under various names including—but not exclusive to—Modernism, Cubism, Imagism, Post Modernism, Formalism, Post-Humanism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Deconstructionism, and Contemporary thinking. While these different schools may have had varying and often ostensibly stark degrees of separation or opposition, one might imagine the example of a recipe which has a definite set of ingredients, but for which an endless variation on the same essential recipe exists.

Chapter I: What is Modernism?

“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Like the scientist attempting to observe an electron directly, but refusing to acknowledge the fact that their very act of observation has itself an effect on the particle being observed, so too are we of the opinion that only if philosophy and ideas are restored to their rightful place in a discussion of art and aesthetics can poems like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” be seen for what they are. The same applies to any work of timeless Beauty.

As all progress in human history has been achieved as a result of humanity’s learning from and honoring its greatest traditions, as well as eschewing its worst; from recognizing mankind’s greatest failures to embracing its greatest triumphs and using such knowledge as the foundation for new bold and insightful acts of creation, so too should a clear understanding of the greatest traditions of our past inform the foundation for the new timeless art of the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, none other than T.S. Eliot—one of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century—remarked that he thought the closing lines of Keats’ ode, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” were a  “blemish” on the poem:

But on re-reading the whole ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement … The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.

– T.S. Eliot’s “Essay on Dante”

Eliot was a very educated and sophisticated intellectual, but he wasn’t the only twentieth century critic to have been befuddled by Keats’ famous lines. The opinion expressed by Eliot is symptomatic of the outlook associated with twentieth century thought and aesthetics—an outlook typified by “New Criticism.”