Posts Tagged ‘beauty’

Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) by John Keats. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Many of us have done our fair share of searching for a definition of “Art”. Some more than others, some with more success than others.

This poem by John Keats is most famous for the following last two lines, generally considered to be linked with the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This is because the whole technique of allusion, and even short quotation, was fundamental to the neoclassicism in which both Reynolds and his readers had been educated.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Searching for the Meaning of Art. Truth and Beauty.

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The visible world is to the artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at times revealing to them the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all things.

They have a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a “still, small voice” which he is impelled to interpret to man.

A Grecian Urn from around 500 B.C.

A Grecian Urn from around 500 B.C.

In the 1819 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats ( read the entire poem here ), the most discussed two lines in all of Keats’s poetry say:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.