How John Keats used Symbolism in his Ode to a Grecian Urn Essay

How John Keats used Symbolism in his Ode to a classical UrnJohn Keats was born in 1795 in Moorfields, England. He was the son of a perpetualman who married the owners daughter and eventually inherited the stable for himself. He was fourteen when his mother died of tuberculosis. Having been apprenticed to an apothecary at the age of fifteen, John felt the need to leave medical field to focus primarily poetry. Keatss imagery ranges from all of our physical sensations sight, touch, sound, taste, and sexuality. Keats is one of the most famous for his Odes. Traditionally, the ode is lengthy, serious in subject, elevated in its diction and style, and often elaborate in its stanza structure. Symbolism seems the obvious term for the dominant style which followed nineteenth-century realism (Wellek 251).According to an article found in Jstor journal, written by Vyacgeslav Ivanov, titled, Symbolism, symbols are far from cosmos an invention and convention of mankind, constitute in the univer se, all pulsating with life, a primordial imprint in the very substance of things and, and it were, an occult language by essence of which is achieved a preordained communion of innumerable kindred spirits, no matter how these spirits may differ in their individual modes of existence or whether they belong to polar orders of creation (Ivanov 29). Keats uses symbolism in Ode to a classical Urn to illustrate his love for ancient Greece.Ode to a Grecian Urn was written by John Keats at well-nigh unknown date. The Urn, as Keats described it, was a classical vase, decorated with a frieze of engraved figures in scenes from pastoral life. In reality it was more than any bad-tempered vase which he had seen on his museum excursions with Haydon or Severn. The Grecian Urn represented poetic vision, the timeless, enchanted world into which the artists imagination alone can enter, as say in Robert Gittings and Jo Mantons book titled The Story of John Keats (Gittings and Manton, pg. 148). I n this poem Keats wants to create a world of pure joy, but the world is of accept believed of people living in a moment in time. In an article titled, Thought is sacrificed to sensation in the poetry of John Keats, author Iain Morrison states that be in a frozen or suspended time, they cannot move or cha... ... to know. The beauty lies in the urn. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, as stated by Catherine Owens Peare, author of a book titled John Keats a Portrait in Words. John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn was both undeniable and incredible. It was inevitable that he should by now have struggled free of the sonnet with its fourteen-line prejudice to create this ten-line stanza and its two pairs of lines and two sets of triple rhymes, inevitable that in developing his own style he should have resolved his philosophic search at this his period of most superb creativity (Peare, pg. 174).Douglas Wilsons article in Jstor titled Reading the Urn Death in Keatss Arcadia, Like Blakes Mental Traveler and so many other romantic poems, Ode on a Grecian Urn invites the reader into a landscape of consciousness. As S.T. Coleridge puts it, the primary function of the poetic work, like the visual language of painting, is to instill vital force into the mind, which compels the imagination to complete the picture. The odes speaker responding to an imaginary urn conjures up, as part of a mental dram, the underside of a vanished culture that created such urns (Wilson 823).