Abstract
The research intends to make a comparison between the "natural" artistic representation in Ode to a Nightingale and the “unnatural” one in Ode on a Grecian Urn by justifying the sense in Ode to a Nightingale to be hearing and the sense in Ode on a Grecian Urn to be sight, so as to illustrate a striking relationship between aesthetics and John Keats’s poetry. The pictorial images, music, or the permanence of art are very characteristic in Keats’s poetry. In Ode to a Nightingale, music is taken as an artifact and the song of the nightingale, which is actually “natural,” pure vocal without any verbal content, turns to be the melody of beauty when it corresponds with the listener’s pure ear, the soul. Thus, the “natural” art becomes eternal beauty. On the contrary, in Ode on a Grecian Urn, the urn itself, taken as an "unnatural" representational shaping, tells us a story, history via a series of scenes or pictures which John Keats imagines must have formed the basis for the artist’s work, and thus, the poet examines the possibilities and limits of an aesthetic medium, the painted truth. By making a comparison between aesthetics and the two odes, in Ode to a Nightingale the experiment that art is pure and “natural” seems to prolong the nonrepresentational music in time, while in Ode on a Grecian Urn the truth that art is not “natural,” like leaves on a tree, but artificial seems to extend the representational visuality in space.
Author Information
River Yu-ling Chiang, Chinese Culture University, Taiwan
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