Keats and the Senses of Being: Ode on a Grecian Urn (Stanza V)

Keats and the Senses of Being: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Stanza V)

ABSTRACT: With its focus on the pathos of permanence versus temporality as human aporia and on the function — the Werksein — of the work of art genuinely encountered, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is a particularly compelling subject for philosophical analysis. The major explications of this most contentiously debated ode in the language have largely focused, however, on various combinations of the poem’s stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological, aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide philosophical approach to the ode’s famously controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urn’s declaration: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). I demonstrate how William Desmond’s metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the between" that elucidates the ode’s culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.

In what ways are philosophy and literature mutually elucidating? More specifically, how can a systematic metaphysics serve as a vehicle of insight into the way that literary art renders, in solution as it were, ontological truths that orchestrate our experience of the ideal? I’d like briefly to address these questions by considering the concluding stanza of John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in terms of four complementary ontological keys. These four senses of being — the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological—are the heart of a compelling ontology detailed by William Desmond in...

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...n the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word [that] leaves the Du free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. (I and Thou 89).

Bibliography

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribners, 1970.

Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany: SUNY P, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 1975.

Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988.

Stambovsky, Phillip. The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1988.

——— Myth and the Limits of Reason. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

Stillinger, Jack, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats’s Odes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.