4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
New Criticism: New criticism is a movement initiated in the 1920s by I. A. Richards.
The New Critics were combating both the long established “biographical” method of
criticism, which involved investigating and relating the facts of authors’ lives while
paying hardly any attention to the works the authors wrote, and a mindless “appreciation”
where works were admired, in general terms, for their wisdom, brilliance, emotional
power (King Lear was “very moving”!) but were not actually read for either their content
or the artistic strategies by which that content was conveyed or, as was frequently the
case, subverted. The New Critics advocate a process of “close reading,” examining a text
one line, one phrase, even one word at a time. New Critics inculcate a particular
interpretation of poetry that resolves any inconsistencies or incongruities in the text.
Regarding Keats, the theme is skepticism concerning visionary imagination. The various
characters in Keats’s major poems are hoodwinked dreamers.
Draw a Keats map consisting of a horizontal line dividing an ideal world above the line
(heaven, immortality, the supernatural, timelessness, etc.) from an actual world below
(earth, mortality, the natural, time, etc.) and position various elements of the poem above
and below the line. How does this visual representation support the existence of the
given theme?
(Note: This simplistic dichotomy is complicated, as the poem develops, by the speaker’s
gradual realization, especially evident in the negatives at the end of stanza 4, that the
ideal permanence is itself a kind of death, in sharp contrast to the life of “breathing
human passion” in the actual world that the speaker earlier wished to escape.)
4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
Deconstruction: Deconstruction takes a view that literary works are disorganized,
illogical, incoherent, essentially indeterminate, and employs a methodology of analyzing
works to find mistakes, inconsistencies, gaps and contradictions. This theory could have
been based solely on “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” because Keats himself had already written
into his text those very incongruities and discordances that Deconstruction was
established to expose. The poem has been deconstructing itself for almost 200 years, but
for many readers it took the 1970s theorizing to make it permissible to say so. Critics
now understand, in even the most admired poems, that some conflicts are not resolved
into agreement, that some closures are not really achieved, and that readers who demand
agreement and closure must supply them interpretively, compensating for lacks in the
actual texts themselves. What paradox, contradictions, or gaps do you perceive in “Ode
on a Grecian Urn”?
4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
Feminism: Feminism has enabled readers to see many imbalances in literature that were
formerly invisible. Feminist readers investigate the sexual politics at work in a given
piece of literature. For instance, in “Passion and Permanence in Keats’s Ode on a
Grecian Urn” Charles Patterson suggests that Keats chose to write about an urn because
its curved shape resembled that of a woman. What sexual politics are at work in this ode,
or at least on the urn itself?
4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
New Historicism: New Historicism is an approach based on the idea of literature as a
social activity involving not only authors but publishers, editors, printers, booksellers,
purchasers, readers, reviewers, critics, teachers, students, and a great deal of nonliterary
historical context, including the political and social ideas of everyone involved, local and
international, and so on. In its political emphasis, New Historicism began as a delicate
outgrowth of Marxist criticism. Politics have always been central in the writings of
Blake, Byron, and Percy Shelley among the Romantics. But what, critics used to ask, can
there possibly be of political interest in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where a speaker is
confronting an old Greek vase with pictures depicting lovers, pipers, trees, a sacrificial
process, and musing on vague abstractions about Beauty and Truth? As it turns out,
critics beginning in the 1980s have discovered plenty of political concerns in the poem.
Keats’s centering the poem in Greek life and culture made a point about the ancient
origins of the modern revolutionary spirit, for example, and publishing it in Annals of the
Fine Arts constituted an attack on the art establishment of the time. What other political
statements can you identify?
4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
Reader-Response: Reader-response criticism makes it increasingly reasonable to accept
the diversity of individual responses to complex poetic texts. Some reader response
critics advocate a practice of “no-fault reading” whereby responses cannot be right or
wrong, merely more or less interesting. Readers combine their own personal experiences
with the given text to arrive at meaning. Jack Stillinger, advocates a practice of “no-fault
reading” whereby responses cannot be right or wrong, merely more or less interesting.
What is your response to “Ode on a Grecian Urn”?
Reader 
 Meaning 
Text
(you)
(“Ode on a Grecian Urn”)
What personal qualities, or
events relevant to this
particular book, might
influence my response?
What textual features might
influence my response?
4AP
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Critical Views
Negative Capability: Keats’s ideal of poetic disinterestedness—“Negative Capability,”
he called it, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats’s Letters 1:193)—can be usefully
applied to “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In the first place exists a negatively capable
author/speaker who asks a great many questions about activities depicted on the urn,
receives no answers to his questions (unless “Beauty is truth” is supposed to be one), but
remains content in his situation of uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. He is content simply
because the final lines, while lacking the logic that would enable clear paraphrase, have
an unmistakable air of resolution about them—the message is from “a friend to man” and
its wisdom is “all ye need to know.” And in the second place, with the help of readerresponse thinking the readers are negatively capable as well, who, like the
author/speaker, similarly don’t know the answers to the questions but are satisfied
without knowing, accepting at the end a kind of contented irresolution.