Robin, responding to my statement ['Perhaps when Keats wrote Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,-that is all /Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to know he was deftly suggesting the
opposite.Beauty is not truth, truth is not beauty on earth (which is why the
words are ascribed to an urn)'], noted: 'Sorry to be picky, David, but
depends which version of the punctuation you take....Either way, not Keats
but the Urn wot says it.' Well, yes Robin, as I said (although the source
journal's house- style italics, which replace quotation marks, don't carry
over to plain text on the web so your point is understandable).
Robin then, helpfully, goes on to quote two alternatives:
['Version One:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" -- That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
... quoth the Urn, with Keats affirming.
Or [my preferred] Version Two:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
... quoth the Urn, with Keats silent.']
- Neither of which agrees with my source, the University of Toronto's
annotated site:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
For those interested in the publication history, the Toronto line note
reads:'When the poem was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts, the
last two lines were without quotation marks. In Lamia, etc., "Beauty is
truth, truth beauty" was set in quotation marks as words of the urn, the
rest being comment by the poet. This reading has caused unnecessary
grammatical confusion. Keats was ill when Lamia, etc., was being prepared
for the press, and we do not know who introduced the limited quotation. Our
text follows the example of the Riverside edition (Douglas Bush, ed.) in
putting the last two lines in quotation marks.'
David Howard
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