Ode on a Grecian Urn

noun

1. a poem (1819) by Keats.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

1. (1819) A poem by John Keats. It contains the famous lines “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”

Example Sentences

Actually, the maxim comes from Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” a much more tumultuous work than “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

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Those six odes — “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to Psyche” and “To Autumn” — rise to heights unscaled by most poets and, indeed, unsuspected by many.

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“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance — a poem with a great deal to say about art and the human experience of time — becomes a piece largely focused on sexual assault, while the beautiful and manifestly apolitical “To Autumn” is spun as a kind of meta-political statement in which Keats comments on our woeful human inability to stop caring about things, like beauty, that have no political dimension.

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But “Ode on a Grecian Urn” this is not.

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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

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