Beauty is in the Eye of Keats

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats.

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' Like most of the literature of the Romantic period, Keats′s poetry mirrors the tension between actuality and ideal perfection, always trying to reach it.

Keats, in the poem Ode Upon a Grecian Urn, turns the traditional understanding of physical objects on its head, and uses them not solid tangible articles, but instead as metaphors for and connections to abstract concepts, such as truth and eternity. In the poem, Keats dismisses the value of physical things as only corporeal for what he feels is more substantial and lasting, the indefinite and abstruse concepts behind them.

Obviously, the urn is beauty (as is the scene), and the urn is art. Truth, on a superficial level, is the answers to Keats' questions about the scene on the urn, but truth is also the truth about all the "big" questions, questions about life and eternity (which he has just mentioned) - Truth with a big "T." The pursuit of this Truth does "tease us out of thought," usually with no satisfaction. However, the emotions that beauty and art evoke and the heights to which they stimulate our imagination are very real. They do bring satisfaction and pleasure. In my opinion, Keats is saying that beauty, whether the beauty of art or nature, and our emotions and imaginative reaction to them are all we can know on earth and all we need to know. This is truth. The wordless emotion itself is Truth.

As in "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet wants to create a world of pure joy, but in this poem the world of fantasy is the life of the people on the urn. Keats sees them, simultaneously, as carved figures on the marble vase and live people in ancient Greece. Existing in a frozen or suspended time, they cannot move or change, nor can their feelings change, yet the unknown sculptor has succeeded in creating a sense of living passion and turbulent action. As in "Ode to a Nightingale," the real world of pain contrasts with the fantasy world of joy. Initially, this poem does not connect joy and pain.