Few poems have demanded as much critical discussion as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is a five-stanza ode written by the British Romantic poet John Keats. At the heart of this poem stands an ancient Greek urn that’s covered in “leaf-fring’d” (line 5) motifs. These motifs include a scene of Dionysian revelry, a portrait of two young lovers frozen in the moment before they kiss, and a ritual procession led by a “mysterious priest” (line 32). These images fascinate the speaker and draw them into the idyllic world of pastoral delights. Yet the images also leave the speaker with many questions that remain unanswered by the silent and enigmatic urn. The poem’s final lines prove as enigmatic to the reader as the urn does to the speaker, in large part due to a matter of disputed punctuation. Most modern editions of the poem punctuate the final lines (49–50) as follows:

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

However, some editions enclose the entirety of these two lines in quotation marks:

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Curiously, the original edition of the poem printed in Annals of the Fine Arts (1819) has no quotation marks at all:

        Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.—That is all
                Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

These discrepancies in punctuation have led to wildly different interpretations of the final lines, and hence of the poem as a whole.

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