Beauty=truth?

[Eufrosyne]

Ive read a lot of poems where the poet claims that truth and beauty are the same, for example Keats ode to a grecian urn:

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

I dont really understand what he means with that, anyone who has a good explanation or interprentation?

[Mark F.]

Keats' main obsession is the fact that he cannot outrun time, that it will inevitably catch up with him in the end. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, the urn symbolises art. Its beauty is immortal while human beauty is ephemeral.

The chiasmus "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." seems to point to some kind of sufficieny...maybe something like; art is all.

[amanda_isabel]

i read 'ode on a grecian urn' some time ago and unfortunately i've forgotten it! but i do remember perhaps its most famous line, which you, eufrosyne, have just quoted. and, without the understanding of the entire piece, the statement can stand on its own.

first, define beauty and truth. in my opinion these are the two things we search for in this world.

beauty is truth--- meaning beauty, in all its different forms, is the truth. real beauty is what truth is--pure.
truth, beauty--- finally discovering the truth is beauty in itself.

am i making sense here??? (forgive me if i'm not at the moment.)

[mono]

I think to fully answer your question, Eufrosyne (and I send compliments on your name), I will most a few of the preceding lines --

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.

One could interpret this a few ways. I agree with Mark F, that the 'urn' in the poem represents art, and also subject themselves to the inevitable ravages of time. In this case, one can apply the common phrase, though I cannot remember who first said it, that art imitates nature.
The Romantic period underwent much complexity during its second generation, of which Keats took a great part in, praising aesthetics - hence the quote, 'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' While the bold statement itself may seem debatable, it seems a matter of perception - does beauty seem synonymous with truth, and vice versa? If so, indeed, it seem 'all ye need to know.'

[Sabo]

Though, not so much on Keats as on beauty and truth:
I always think of the Arabic fairy tales: the good ones are beautiful, the ugly ones evil. Something Hollywood also adapted I guess to some extent it's a kind of archetypal notion. Associations seen often to have been beauty-good-truth-God; ugly-evil-lie-devil.

[Thing12789]

I've always interpreted the poem to be a celebration of the imagination. Keats says in the poem that unheard melodies are sweeter than the ones that we can hear. In other words, what we imagine in our minds is often better and more beautiful than reality. All of Keat's speculation about the charaters depicted on the urn goes with this idea. He didn't know what the artist was actually trying to convey, but his speculation was the only truth that he knew. This plays into the beauty=truth idea because what we imagine and believe is our truth. And no matter what that is, it is beautiful because it is our truth, our reality. The ideas, the truths, that our imagination conceives are beautiful. I hope I'm making sense. I don't have Keat's talent of written expression.

[Eufrosyne]

Thanks for your answers! I think it´s getting clearer now...!

[stlukesguild]

I am quite certain that Keat's is not suggesting anything like the Hollywood/fairytale idea that the beautiful are good and the ugly are bad. This is far to shallow of an idea, and I don't think anyone of any intellect by this point in history would have accepted such a notion. On the other hand, I think Keat's phrase is often seen as a precursor of the ideas of the "aesthetes": authors such as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Huysmans, Theophile Gautier, etc... who placed art... the aesthetics of art above any concern for extra-art issues (such as "truth", "morality", etc...). Hence we get Oscar Wilde's "All art is quite useless", "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling", etc... As a late Romantic, however, I think that Keats fell more in line with the belief that Art and "beauty" were of some great inherent worth. Like John Ruskin's theories, I always got the sense that to him "beauty" was of great moral worth. By way of analogy, I think of Matisse who was often criticized for his continuing to create "pretty", beautiful pictures as Europe spiraled through two world wars. Thinking of Faulkner's great Nobel acceptance speach I find that the artist's insistence upon continuing to create such beauty in the face of such ugliness and uncertainty is of the greatest worth... it suggests a belief in the future... a belief in some absolutes... a belief that mankind will come to its senses one day. While certain "truths" (religious, political, etc...) come and go, I imagine Keats clinging to the absolute truth of "beauty"... Art.

In a much more verbose (but equally gorgeously written manner) Walter Pater suggests something similar:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,–for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own...

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve–les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

[Virgil]

Just to add complexity to this debate, here's Sonnet XIV fro Shakespeare:

XIV by William Shakespeare

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

So did Keats get the idea of the link between truth and beauty from Shakespeare?

[mono]

I am quite certain that Keat's is not suggesting anything like the Hollywood/fairytale idea that the beautiful are good and the ugly are bad. This is far to shallow of an idea, and I don't think anyone of any intellect by this point in history would have accepted such a notion . . . As a late Romantic, however, I think that Keats fell more in line with the belief that Art and "beauty" were of some great inherent worth. Like John Ruskin's theories, I always got the sense that to him "beauty" was of great moral worth. By way of analogy, I think of Matisse who was often criticized for his continuing to create "pretty", beautiful pictures as Europe spiraled through two world wars .

Firstly, I do not think all beauty-truth link must seem connected with the common cliché thoughts of Hollywood and glamour, where the bad witch of The Wizard Of Oz looked hideous and the good witch looked beautiful, for example. Indeed, I agree, that would seem a shallow interpretation. Nonetheless, I quote again:

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.

From these lines, I gather the undying wisdom of art lasting through the years, 'a friend of man,' and 'speaking' that 'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' I feel these last lines of Ode On A Grecian Urn write quite literally, but I would love to hear your actual interpretation; of course, art's interpretations number greatly more than art pieces themselves.
[QUOTE=stlukesguild}While certain "truths" (religious, political, etc...) come and go, I imagine Keats clinging to the absolute truth of "beauty"... Art.[/QUOTE]
This sentence seems to say a lot, primarily with the word 'absolute.' As I posted above, I think Keats, and many of the other early and late Romantics, may have mainly indirectly followed the popular phrase (and, again, I cannot remember who wrote it first, but I know Kant, Emerson, and Montaigne later reaffirmed it) that 'all art imitates nature.' I do not think it ironic that many of the Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Blake, etc.) meditated and wrote so extensively on nature - not only on common nature (trees, oceans, sky, and the like), but also human nature through the reference of mythology and mysticism. Whether Keats, and other Romantic poets, considered the absolute truth of beauty art, I cannot say for sure, yet feel quite confident that they derived their art from the admiration of nature.

[Eufrosyne]

Maybe it´s in human nature or something to feel that while our own lives can seem short and ugly there is something everlasting beautiful in art, or nature, or why not in a grecian urn. I got that feeling from both Keat´s poem and that quote by Walter Pater. In that way beauty can be more true, something we can always trust.
I liked the text you quoted, stlukesguild. From where did you get it?

[holograph]

I think so far Keats' view has been explained quite sufficiently regarding the quote. Truth and beauty are not used in their literal senses but as aesthetic ideals. Although, I do not agree with Keats (or Shakes) on this one. There is no such thing as truth, nor is there such thing as beauty. And the two, though complimentary, are definetely not equivalent ideas.

[stlukesguild]

I cannot remember who wrote it first, but I know Kant, Emerson, and Montaigne later reaffirmed it) that 'all art imitates nature.' I do not think it ironic that many of the Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Blake, etc.) meditated and wrote so extensively on nature - not only on common nature (trees, oceans, sky, and the like), but also human nature through the reference of mythology and mysticism. Whether Keats, and other Romantic poets, considered the absolute truth of beauty art, I cannot say for sure, yet feel quite confident that they derived their art from the admiration of nature.

Yes... I agree with this to an extent. I would qualify it by suggesting that the Romantics, to my mind, were not so much interested in nature for what it was or how it appeared, but rather how it affected them. That seems to be the major innovation of Wordworth, for example, the act of turning the inner life of the artist into the subject matter. To my mind they seem more often to write (or paint) how nature made them feel. Thinking on this... I might suggest that Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (as well as the poems on the Elgin Marbles and Chapman's Homer, etc...) is somewhat ahead of its time in establishing an art object, rather than a part of nature, as the inspiration upon which the artist meditates. This concept is built upon by subsequent poets: Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures", Rilke's "Dinggedicte" or "thing-poems", etc...

On the topic of art immitating nature... artists, writers, etc... have never been of a common belief. I found the following quotes in support of this concept:

"Human ingenuity will never devise an invention more simple,
more beautiful, more direct than does nature; because in her
inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
-Leonardo DaVinci

"First follow nature!"
-Alexander Pope

"What great scandal it is to hear nature despised...by those
who are not conscious of how the smallest part of nature
overwhelms and amazes those who know most!"
-Goya

"Choose only one master: Nature!"
-Leonardo DaVinci

"No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.
-Marcus Aurelius

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is sort of a grandchild of God.
-Dante

All art is but imitation of nature.
-Seneca

On the other hand, there are plenty who question the notion of art as a mere imitation of nature:

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
-Oscar Wilde

"Art is nature's rival." - Apuleius

"I must confess, mine eye and heart
Dote less on nature than on art"
-Catullus

The aim off art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle

To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist
is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with
nature.
-Paul Cezanne

I don't think that Keats in any way approaches Wilde's notion of art as an aesthetic object outside of nature... or rather than an imitation of nature, one more thing added to nature. In many ways I imagine Keat's meditation upon the Grecian urn... upon the art object as echoing Goethe's dictum, "Art is long, life is fleeting." A poem that one might do well to compare with Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn might be Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli":

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or On shipboard,
Camel-back; horse-back, ***-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

ps... The quote from Walter Pater comes from the "Conclusion" to his marvelous The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, a book of meditations (for lack of a better term for this marvelous bit of poetic prose that is quite unlike anything) which is one of the most influential bits of literature of the late 19th century. Wilde, Gautier, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, T.S Eliot, Yeats, and many more were endlessly indebted to Pater and this book.

pps... Oh... by the way... looking through my quotes by artists/writers on the issue of art/nature I found these two great little quotes:

Nature does many things the way I do, but
she hides them!
-Pablo Picasso

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
- W.H. Auden

[stlukesguild]

There is no such thing as truth, nor is there such thing as beauty.

Interesting assertion... care to elaborate?

[Thorwench]

Could it not be the case that Keats picks up on Plato's philosophy which postulates that truth = beauty = reality? Plato's reality belongs to the world of ideas which is actually unatainable for humans who live in the world of appearances. For the ancient Greeks, and especially for the followers of Plato, truth and beauty were one and the same thing.