How does Cleanth Brooks defend ‘’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’’ highlighting the theme                                                                                               

             "Beauty is truth, truth beauty’’. Whatever is beautiful must also be true and whatever is true must also be beautiful. Thus beauty and truth are inseparable. Beauty and truth are two sides of the one and the same thing. Beauty thus has a moral quality and all true morality has a beautiful character. Another interpretation of this line is that beauty lies in the real world of men not merely in act or in the fairyland of fancy. According to this interpretation ‘’truth’’ stands for the real and actual world as distinguished from the world of imagination.  According to still another interpretation, truth have does not mean truth to actual life it means truth to life as one imagine it. The word ‘’truth’’ has obviously a very wide meaning it includes the facts of life as actually lived as also life as one may imagine it. The very ambiguity of the statement, ‘’beauty is truth, truth beauty’’ ‘’ought to warn us’’ says Cleanth Brooks, ‘’against insisting very much on the statement in isolation, and drive us back to a consideration of the context in which the statement is set. The question of real importance is not whether Eliot, Murry, Garrod are right in thinking that ‘’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’’ injures the poem. The urn is beautiful and yet its beauty is based on an imaginative perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful but it is also true. Cleanth Brooks observes ‘’it takes a few details and so orders them that we have not only beauty but insight into essential truth. Those who say that the statement ‘’Truth is beauty’’ is false ignore their experience of the tragic act. Beauty is thus a middle term which connects and reconciles two kinds of truth through the mediation of beauty, truth of fact becomes truth of affirmation, truth of life. From the beginning to end, the poem demonstrates that the kind of beauty that the urn has is incommensurate with the kind of truth that man must live by.   The famous words ‘’beauty is truth, truth beauty’’ truth here does not mean truth to the facts of life as actually lived it means truth of life as one may imagine it in terms of the day-dream of having it both ways.

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                                                                                                          Jenophin Jini.