David:
> 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).
No, I was being sloppy -- you do make the distinction between Keats says and
the Urn says. I misread you there.
> Robin then, helpfully, goes on to quote two alternatives:
> - 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.'
Miriam Allot _The Complete Poems_ (Longman's Annotated, 1970) reads thusly
[ain't OCR wonderful?]:
V
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed-
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'-that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
... and notes [at almost interminable length] ...
49-50. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.-That is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Annals.
The inverted commas of 1820 are omitted in Garrod on the grounds that they
are missing in Annals and the four transcripts. Their inclusion in 1820 has
led some critics, including Murry, to believe that only the words enclosed
in them are spoken by the urn. It has been variously argued by other writers
(1) that the two lines are addressed by the urn to man, (2) that the passage
outside the inverted commas is addressed by K. to the reader, (3) that this
passage is addressed by K. to the urn. (1) is probably the correct
interpretation in view of the aphoristic style, possibly deliberately
emphasized by the inverted commas in 1820, the use of 'Ye' (cp. 'us','ours'
at 11. 45,48) and the urn's consoling capacity as 'friend to man'; for
additional support for this view based on the evidence of the punctuation of
the two lines in the transcripts see Alvin Whitley's 'The message of the
Grecian Urn', Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin v (1953) 1-3, and cp. also
Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases..., 'On the painted vases
inscriptions are often found. . . sometimes the inscription contains a moral
sentiment' (7). Opinions about the meaning of the beauty-truth equivalent
and its relevance to the rest of the poem can be roughly divided as follows:
(1) philosophically defensible but of doubtful relevance (Murry); (2) a
'pseudo-statement' but emotionally relevant (I. A. Richards); (3) expressing
the paradoxes in the poem and therefore dramatically appropriate (C.
Brooks); (4) meaningless and therefore a blemish (T. S. Eliot); (5) an
over-simplification, but attempting a positive synthesis of the oppositions
expressed in the poem (F. W. Bateson); (6) emotionally and intellectually
relevant when properly understood, but 'the effort to see the thing as Keats
did is too great to be undertaken with pleasure' (W. Empson).
The passage is obviously a final, if not wholly convincing, attempt to
subdue the disquieting feelings first appearing in the poem at 11. 15-20.
The phrasing recalls K.'s tentative early discussion of the value of art in
his Dec. 1817 letter, 'The excellence of every Art is in its intensity,
capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close
relationship with Beauty and Truth' (L i 192). Other references to 'Beauty'
and 'Truth' appear in L i 184, ii 19.
... but whichever version of the punctuation you take, it still seems to me
to be on the edge of a platitude.
Your phrasing, which I should have paid more attention to:
> [Keats] 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)'
... makes (for me) the best of a bad job. The phrase is carrying a hell of
a lot of previous ***, which gets rather flattened in the (whichever reading
you take of the last two lines) blunt assertiveness of the Truth/Beauty
equation.
But then I don't go a bundle on the Urn anyway. I'd see Keats as gnawing
away at the problem throughout the Odes/Autumn, and only in 'To Autumn',
reaching any sort of imaginative conclusion.
Robin
*** most notably, maybe, Plato via Ficino/Pico into [in English] Hoby's
translation of _The Courtier_ -- "Beauty and goodness are one selfsame
thing." [Sorry, off the top of my head that, not checked.] But in _Il
Cortegiano_, it's argued over, not simply dumped on us, and rooted in the
Platonic context.
R2
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