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Keats’s Odes

To understand where “Ode on a Grecian Urn” sits in relation to Keats’s other five odes, please consult this guide, which provides an analytical overview.

John Donne, “The Sun Rising”

Though Donne’s poem doesn’t take the form of an ode, he uses a stanza form that’s similar to Keats’s. That is, both poets use a ten-line stanza that bears a remarkable similarity to the sonnet. In doing so, these poets at once harness the compression of the sonnet form, and yet expand the poem’s scope beyond what a sonnet could otherwise accommodate.

Homer, Iliad

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” features a poetic device known as ekphrasis, which involves the literary description of visual art. Perhaps the most famous example of ekphrasis in a literary text appears in book 18 of Homer’s Iliad, which presents a suitably epic, 130-line description of the motifs on the famous shield of Achilles.

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