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Notes
E. D. Hirsch,Validity of Interpretation, (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 171.
As a matter of general interest, I give the results of my survey. I examined 158 interpretations (extending from the mid-nineteenth century to the present) of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Fifty-four of them either did not discuss the concluding lines or did not state a viewpoint. The remaining 104 (56 of which are excerpted in Harvey Lyon'sKeats' Well-Read Urn [New York: Henry Holt, 1958]) are divided as follows: 7, in life; 9, in Keats's dream world; 5, in Platonic reality; 10, in the world of the Urn; 61, in imaginative or artistic perception; and 12, in eternity. A surprisingly low figure is that for Platonic reality. Not all interpreters who use the word “Platonism” are in fact committed to that view. I have included no interpretation that is not definitely committed to one of the views I have listed. But an interpretation might, for example, concentrate on Keats's dream world, yet interpret the concluding lines as referring to imaginative or artistic perception.
The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), I, p. 102. Hereafter cited in the text. An example of the view that beauty refers to life is Pratap Biswas' “Keats's Cold Pastoral,”UTQ, 47 (Winter, 1977–78), pp. 95–111.
E. C. Pettet,On the Poetry of Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957), p. 333.
Christopher Caldwell,Illusion and Reality (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 94.
Martha Shackford, “TheOde on a Grecian Urn,”KSJ, 4 (Winter 1955), p. 12.
Cleanth Brooks,The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 150, 140, 150.
In “Death and Burial,”The Round Table, 1817, and “Life after Death,”The London Journal, 1834. Quoted by S. R. Swaminathan, “The Odes of Keats,”KSMB, 12 (1961), pp. 45–46.
The most thorough and helpful interpretation of the Adam's dream letter is Newell Ford's inThe Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), pp. 20–38.
In “Death and Burial.” Quoted by Swaminathan, pp. 45–46.
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Austin, A.C. Toward resolving Keats' Grecian Urn ode. Neophilologus 70, 615–629 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02001216
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02001216