Ode on a Grecian Urn: Historical & Literary Context

British Romantic Poetry

Keats belongs to a period of British poetry known as Romanticism. Other key poets in this period include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Admittedly, there’s no neat way to summarize the diversity represented by these poets. However, it is possible to note two broad trends that characterized the Romantic era. First, Romantic writers generally privileged intuition over rationality. Second, they emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. Shelley encapsulated both these trends in his essay, “A Defence of Poetry” (1840), which pits philosophical reason against the poetic imagination. Whereas reason emphasizes differences, imagination underscores “the similitudes of things.” As such, the poetic imagination is an intuitional form of expression that reveals the underlying unity and beauty of the world, which in turn enables the development of civilization. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” powerfully reflects Shelley’s emphasis on the primacy of the imagination. The speaker spends the entire poem not just wondering about who is depicted on the urn, but also speculating about the internal experience of the figures painted on its surface. This type of speculation demonstrates a “poetic” logic that defies rationality.

The Tradition of the Ode

The ode is a type of lyric poetry that originated with the ancient Greek poets Horace and Pindar. They developed this form as a way to convey emotion, typically in response to an event, person, object, or idea. Greek odes were typically performed to music. They were also strict in terms of meter and typically involved a formal division into three parts known as the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. When early modern writers such as Edmund Spenser took up this tradition, they adapted it for their own use. They abandoned the formal requirements of the Greek models, but they retained the idea of the ode as a song that responds with a degree of seriousness appropriate to its subject. Spenser, for example, conceived his 1595 ode “Epithalamion” as a marriage song for his new bride. Odes continued to appear in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they took on a new importance for the British Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley all composed odes, but arguably none proved a more gifted master of the form than Keats, whose six odes rank among the greatest poems in the language.