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When I first studied Romanticism, I didn t think that the works of Locke and Berkeley could have influenced this artistic movement. Indeed romantic poets, such as John Keats, reveal their concerns with the British Empiricist. Claims that the external world, which constituted the content of poetry before the 17 th century, altered. John Keats in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn reflects this reaction by turning inward to the attractive domain invulnerable to philosophic speculations. Midway in the 17 th century John Locke criticized the na ve notion of perception and started the philosophical movement known as British Empiricism. He stated that knowledge comes from experience.
He had a different opinion from the Continental Rationalists about where knowledge starts: the Rationalists thought that knowledge comes from fundamental concepts and innate ideas intuitively known through reason. Instead, Locke rejected the presence of innate ideas and said that at birth human reason is a tabula rasa. He believed that knowledge comes from the sense experience and from internal motions of the soul, which include emotions and sentiments. Berkeley, another empiricist, went further arguing that something exists only when it is perceived by a mind, thus esse est percept. John Keats reacted to these philosophic beliefs turning inward and writing about emotions, which cannot be proved to not exist. This is evident in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn.
The poet describes the urn from a sentimental point of view; he expresses his feelings seeing in his minds eye what is behind the images. Although he says that the pictures on the urn cannot express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme, he gives perfection to those images by writing this poem so that when it is read, his emotions are recalled by the reader (3 - 4). On the urn there are represented several images of life scenes. From these, Keats imagines the hidden story and recreates in his imagination the events happened on the representation. The images described become immortal because they are frozen in time: thus the lover cannot kiss the maiden he pursues, although their love will last forever, along with the happy boughs, which will never shed their leaves (20 - 21). In the second stanza Keats says that Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter (11 - 12); the heard melodies come from the senses, whereas those unheard ones are created by the imagination.
The poem starts from the physical urn and then Keats turns inwards making the rest of the poem an illustration of unheard melodies; Keats works on his imagination trying to explain the pictures on the urn. Further more, as the philosopher criticized the existence of the reality, claiming that it has no value, Keats gave to beauty the greatest significance. At the end of the poem it is written Beauty is truth, truth beauty (49). The urn makes him understand that beauty is the path to truth and the only thing Keats can be sure of; the poet is alluding to the internal beauty that gives pleasure to humans. The picture in itself is neither beautiful, nor ugly. Instead, the concept of beauty is in the observer who perceives the image; the author is confident about this and therefore wrote the poem to describe the beauty of his internal world.
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Research essay sample on 17 Th Century Grecian Urn
