- The document discusses John Keats and his concept of beauty and negative capability. It analyzes several of Keats' odes, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". - Keats believed that beauty was truth and sought beauty in nature, mythology, and every art form. He found that change and the interplay between different worlds brought beauty. - The document examines themes of conflict in Keats' odes between transient passion and enduring art, dream and reality, joy and melancholy, and other dualities. It explores Keats' theory of negative capability and how it influenced his poetic style and philosophy.

2. • The power of imagination
• What we find beauty in the world or in our
imagination. Beauty is truth or truth is beauty.
• Art is about beauty, not about teaching or persuasion
• Keats' poem is after the form of the Horatian ode.

3. • Keats is a poet of beauty. He not only worships
beauty but also quests for beauty.
• For Example: He finds beauty in Autumn in
Ode to Autumn. He is a worshiper of Psyche in
Ode to Psyche. She is the victim of Cupid but
she is a true lover. It is also her true love which
makes her beautiful.
• With Beauty Keats seeks for Truth and for him
‘truth is beauty, beauty is truth’. Ode on a
Grecian Urn.

4. • He finds beauty in each and every object of
nature.
• To seek beauty he goes to Greek mythology.
• There are so many references of Greek myths
in the poems of Keats.
• He expresses beauty through imagery.
• Though images.
• Urn, trees, lovers, flute pipe, granary, forest,
bird, seasons, love, death, etc….

5. • It is the ‘change’ which brings beauty and
charm to life. For ex. Ode on a Grecian Urn.
• In Ode on a Grecian Urn he is moving between
two worlds. One, which is frozen, which is
carved upon the Urn and the other is the world
of speaker which is mortal and brings changes
in moods, emotions, in life.
• He finds beauty in the music – heard and
unheard.
• Each and every art is beautiful for him.
• In the hands of Keats Pain also has its own
beauty.

6. Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Ode on a Grecian Urn: a
meditation on an urn
• Stanza 1: Imagery
• The first four lines serve to
present the urn first as a
bride, then as a foster-child,
then as a historian. These
comparisons are productive,
if fully visualized
• The use of imagery, sound
effects, and poetic form in
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn

8. • The urn is an as yet unravished bride of quietness.
It is not a wife. This may mean that the pictures on
the urn are as sharp as the day it was made.
• The urn is an adopted child of silence and slow
time. This may refer to the urn as a product of the
busyness and industry of an artisan's workshop
that now, probably in a museum, stands separate
from the bustle and noise of human life.

9. Sound effects
• pipes and timbrels,
• Stanza 2: Imagery, Ode on a Grecian Urn
• The imagery in stanza 2 is straightforward, yet
it is used to express complex ideas: unheard
melodies are sweeter than heard melodies, so
"pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone"; the lover
who will never kiss, yet who will love forever.
The "sweeter unheard melodies" is an
expression of the speaker's great respect for
imagination.

10. Sound effects
• There is particular emphasis on the "ver" sound, for
example "nor ever, …lover, never, never." Every line
of the sestet but the last is filled with "not" and
"never." This causes tension to build that is resolved
in the last line of the sestet.

11. • Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme
of "Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the
world of imagination offers a release from the painful
world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the
world of actuality more painful by contrast.“
• Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems
are related to, or grow directly out of...inner
conflicts."
• Pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a
Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn” and in Ode
to Psyche; love is intertwined with pain, and
pleasure.

12. Conflicts in Keats’ Odes
• transient sensation or passion / enduring art
• dream or vision / reality
• joy / melancholy
• the ideal / the real
• mortal / immortal
• life / death
• separation / connection
• being immersed in passion / desiring to escape
passion
• Identity crisis

13. Keats' Theory of Negative Capability
• 'The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to
contemplate the world without the desire to try and
reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed
and rational systems.‘
• “Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace
uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with
ambiguity.

14. • The excellence of every Art is its intensity,
capable of making all disagreeables evaporate,
from their being in close relationship with
beauty & truth I mean Negative Capability,
that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason with a
great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes
every other consideration, or rather
obliterates all consideration.

15. • Keats' theory of "negative capability" is
concerned with a particular state of poetic
receptivity that makes literary creation
possible. 1st "concentrates on capturing the
intensity of emotion and communicating this
feeling via the imagination.

16. • This involves a key action: the poet must
throw himself into an object in order to
obliterate his personal identity. The purpose
of this is to fuse emotional intensity with the
object so that the object becomes symbolic of
the emotions.
• This complete fusion of poet and thing is so
intense that all "disagreeables," all
associations that are not particularly relevant
to the poet’s key insight, are displaced.

17. • The beauty and the truth are a union of the
perceived object and the poet’s emotions.
This is especially important to Keats because it
removes the need to establish a kind of
scientific certainty; instead, the poet (and
audience) reveal in the mystery, the undefined
ambiguities. It represents an openness to
experience. Keats' theory breaks down as the
following:

18. • Imagination communicates an intense emotion.
• The poet gives up personal identity to focus on the
object being described.
• As a result, the object becomes symbolic of these
intense emotions.
• And all other matters not important to this emotion
are sidelined.
• The poem's beauty/truth are a combination of poetic
emotion and perceived object.
• This leaves open the enjoyment of mystery because
the poem is a subjective truth.

19. • The urn in "Ode to a Grecian Urn," is an object
that speaks a truth and a beauty, but that
truth and beauty are understood with the
help of negative capability of the artist. The
urn's message is very simple, open-ended and
mysterious.

20. • Keats says that the 'poetical character... has no self- it
is everything and nothing- it has no character and
enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or
fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated- it
has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an
Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher
delights the camelion Poet... A Poet is the most
unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has
no identity, he is continually filling some other body’.

21. Thank You