Intro
Keats was a favorite of the New Critics—probably because he loved a good paradox. In The Well Wrought Urn (Chapter 8, "Keats's Sylvan Historian"), Cleanth Brooks takes a microscope to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and moves through it stanza by stanza. You know, like you might in your senior thesis. (We're not trying to plant ideas in your head or anything. This is all just a dream…)
Now, it's not like the "old" critics thought this poem was terrible. But, before Brooks, many critics thought that it had one major flaw: its super strange ending. The whole "beauty is truth, truth beauty" thing just didn't seem quite right to them.
Like, Is it a moral? Does it even make sense? And did the urn seriously just start talking to us?
In musing on these questions, Brooks says that we could totally go through all of Keats's letters. You know, since we have nothing better to do in our spare time, we could spend it tracing Keats's use of words like "truth" and "beauty" over his whole lifetime, and try to use that information to parse the end of the poem.
But Brooks thinks that such an exercise wouldn't actually help us interpret the end of the poem at all. It might help us interpret what Keats's idea of the end of the poem was. But it would never help us better understand those lines in the context of the poem itself. In the context of the world the poem had created for us.
So, now on to The B Man's analysis of "Ode on a Grecian Urn." He says that since the piece is all about paradoxes, this strange ending is perfectly fitting. A silent urn speaks. The warm, active pastoral scene is actually occurring on cold, unmoving marble.
These are stark contradictions that still ring true for us as readers—A+ paradoxes, if you ask us. No wonder Keats's Urn speaks in riddles.
To get deeper into this notion of the paradox in Keats, and how the New Critics analyzed the poem through a fresh lens, let's take a close look at the third stanza and the final lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
Quote
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
[…]
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Analysis
If we're on the lookout for paradoxes, then we might end up highlighting the whole poem. The boughs can't shed their leaves, the "melodist" pipes without getting tired or repeating himself, and love is always waiting to be enjoyed. This whole warm, happy, noisy, busy scene is actually cold, silent, and still.
And the description of "cold pastoral" is pitch perfect. It's a summary of the whole paradox fashioned so carefully in the piece: a cold, inanimate surface (the urn) that depicts a warm, lively scene (a pastoral).
When the urn says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," then, Brooks wants us to keep our eyes open for irony. It's a "cold pastoral," and a "silent form" that "say'st" riddles. So we probably shouldn't trust the urn to be honest with us, and take "beauty is truth, truth beauty" at face value.
The beauty of the scene on the urn isn't quite real, is it? But we loved it nonetheless.