Critics charges against Keats’s poem

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

                                                                             M. Sahaya Anish Benit,

                                                                             I MA English Literature,

Holy Cross College,

Nagercoil-4

          Keats had seen a Grecian urn at the London museum which inscribed with pictures and inspired him to compose his famous poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the last stanza of the poem, Keats pronounces the statement “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” This line was criticized by many critics like T.S.Eliot, Middleton Murray and Garrod.

            T.S.Eliot said that the line, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” strikes him as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem. He also gave the reason that he failed to understand it, or this statement was untrue.

            Middleton Murray who discussed Keats’s other poems and his letters felt that he knows what Keats meant by “beauty” and what he meant by “truth”, and that Keats used them in senses  which allowed them to be properly bracketed together, to conclude: “My own opinion concerning the value of these two lines in the context of the poem itself is not very different from Mr. T.S.Eliots.”

            Garrod, another famous critic remarks, “a distaste for the ending of the ‘ode’ is by no means limited to critics of notoriously ‘modern’ sympathies.”

            Keats adds this line to increase the beauty of the poem but these critics thinks that it injures the poem. Like Shakespeare “Ripeness is all”, it is a speech in character supported by a dramatic context. The last line of the poem will not be out of place but definitely the climax of the poem.