18 pages • 36 minutes read
John KeatsOde on a Grecian Urn
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1820A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” by John Keats (1819)
Written in the same year as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats’ ballad provides a contrast in tone, subject, and form to the neoclassical elements of an ode written in iambic pentameter. Using more traditionally Romantic subject matter, such as a mysterious woman, a supernatural and dreamlike event, and a medieval context, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” explores more deeply the pain of unrequited love and the ideal romantic encounter by placing it in a Medieval context, rather than a Hellenic exploration of classical ideals.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834)
Written by one of the foremost English Romantic poets, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” transports readers into a realm where imagination, the supernatural, and the natural world combine. The poem recounts a sailor’s experiences after he returns from a long sea voyage. The sailor stops a man who is on his way to a wedding and begins telling the man his story. Though the sailor’s journey began with good fortune, a storm pushed the ship south toward the Antarctic. An albatross appeared and led the ship from the ice jam preventing the ship from moving, and even though the other sailors praised and fed the albatross, the sailor shot it. The sailors punish the sailor for shooting the bird. Meanwhile, as the wedding guest listens to the sailor’s story, he grows more impatient. Similar to how Keats used them in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Coleridge utilizes repetition and personification throughout the poem to create a sense of fear, serenity, and the supernatural.
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
Like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” focuses on humankind’s futility and mortality through one individual’s experience. The poem’s speaker personifies death and focuses on the peace and serenity offered by death. Death appears as a gentleman, riding in a horse-drawn carriage, who picks up the speaker and accompanies the speaker to the afterlife. As the speaker and Death pass children in playgrounds, the poem juxtaposes aging and youth. The poem incorporates figures of speech like “setting sun” to portray the onset of death. Similar to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poem relies on personification and anaphora to move the poem forward and convey the speaker’s experience.
Further Literary Resources
“John Keats’s Politics of Pain and Renewal” by David B. Hobbs (2021)
David B. Hobbs provides an analytical review of Anahid Nersessian’s insightful book Keats’s Ode: A Lover’s Discourse, wherein he specifically comments on Nersessian’s treatment of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Hobbs emphasizes Nersessian’s focus on Marxism in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” how Keats “was highly aware of literary history’s persistent violence” and that the poem’s “creepy persona delights in this aspect and is highlighting it to the addressee.”
“Poetry of the Soul: The Sublime and Wondrous Odes of John Keats” by Shikoh Mohsin Mirza (2021)
This article examines how Keats’s poetry mirrors “his noble soul,” while at the same time embodying “the Sublime in its intellectual, ethical and spiritual dimensions.” The article explicates theories behind Keats’s composition process, asserting that Keats both drew from the idea of the sublime in his poetry, just as he added new aspects to the idea of the sublime itself. In correlation to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the article carefully focuses on “Ode to Psyche” as the “pinnacle” of Keats’s imagination and “Ode to a Nightingale” as an expression of the “ephemeral nature of human existence.” Mirza describes “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a poem of “spiritual awareness,” and advocates Keats’s philosophy promoting humanity’s involvement in the arts.
“Was the poet John Keats a graverobber?” by Kelly Grovier (2019)
John Keats’s training as a medical professional is the focus of this article, which examines clues from his odes that may reveal his involvement in graverobbing. Grovier discusses Keats’s obsession with the “materiality of human burial,” as well as how the poet’s medical studies might have found him involved in assisting bodysnatchers. Grovier examines graverobbing and the medical profession’s intertwined, grisly history aside Keats’s own failures to complete his medical studies. The article highlights Keats’s “Ode on Indolence,” which relies on a living person’s infiltration of a space of death and incorporates the imagery of an urn as well as ghost-like supernatural elements. The speaker of “Ode on Indolence” tracks the dead to their presumed place of internment and imagines himself sharing the same space as them, and Grovier concludes Keats’s final poetic sketches are suggest how preoccupied he was with the living and the dead occupying the same spaces.
Listen to Poem
Filmed in 2019 at the Keats House in Hampstead for the Keats Foundation, Matthew Coulton gives a masterful and powerful reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on the 200th anniversary of the poet’s “Great Odes of 1819.”
Related Titles
By John Keats
