Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats’s place is well established as a prominent poet in the second generation of British Romantic poets. The Romantic movement lasted from about 1800 to 1850 and was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion over the Enlightenment Period’s distanced rationalism. It competed with Neoclassicism, which coincided with the Enlightenment, and emphasized science and reason over emotion and individualism. Scholars consider the movement as beginning in 1798 with the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Romantic poets like Keats sought to explore and understand the sublime, the supernatural and the extraordinary, while their poetry engaged with the subjective human experience of passion, melancholy, and beauty.

Keats’s work draws both from Romantic tropes that were popular in the early 19th century and forges them as an emergent voice in the movement. William Wordsworth defined Romanticism as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and Keats’s poetic style relied heavily on the fusion of extreme emotion with natural imagery. Keats’s vivid and passionate poetry relied on and invoked all the human senses, presenting them in a combination that produced a heightened sensual effect. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with its theme of finding the transient spaces art offers, is a prime example of Wordsworth’s idea that tranquility helps recollect emotion. As the tranquil disappears, the poet reaches an emotional state similar to the original state when the poet first experienced the subject. Scholars cite Keats as a major influence on the Romantic period, as his poetry often depicted inner turmoil, the pain of love and life, and the fear of facing one’s mortality.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” exhibits multiple characteristics celebrated by the Romantics, from natural imagery and idealized love, to the supernatural and sublime. The poem incorporates natural imagery, particularly an everlasting, lush greenery. The poem also relies on language rooted in natural imagery, such as words like “flowery” (Line 4), “leaf-ring’d” (Line 5), and the depiction of “happy, happy boughs!” (Line 21). The poem depicts the speaker’s passion for the urn as well as the young piper’s passion for his lover. The speaker relies on his imagination to bring to life the etchings’ stories. The speaker’s emotion becomes evident in the exclamatory and interrogative statements they use. Keats brings a subjective gaze to the poem, as the speaker invests himself in the urn by attempting to engage with the urn from multiple aspects. The urn also bears supernatural elements as its stories seem to come to life for the speaker and possess him. The urn itself is an object of grandeur for the speaker, and their interaction with it, which could be an ordinary experience for some, is for them an extraordinary experience bordering on the sublime. These points of engagement are characteristic of the Romantic movement, despite the neo-classical subject matter of the poem.