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CHAPTER EIGHT Keatss Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes There is much in the poetry of Keats which suggests that he would have approved of Archibald MacLeish dictum, A poem should not mean/ But be. There is even some warrant for thinking that the Grecian urn (real or imagined) which inspired the famous ode was, for Keats, just such a poem, palpable and mute, a poem in stone. Hence it is the more remarkable that the Ode itself differs from Keatss other odes by culminating in a statement -- a statement even of some sententiousness in which the urn itself is made to say that beauty is truth, and -- more sententious still -- that this bit of wisdom sums up the whole of mortal knowledge. This is to mean with a vengeance -- to violate the doctrine of the objective correlative, not only by stating truths, but by defining the limits of truth. Small wonder that some critics have felt that the unravished bride of quietness protests too much. T. S. Eliot, for example, says that this line [Beauty is truth, etc.] strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. But even for persons who feel that they do understand it, the line may still constitute a blemish. Middleton Murry, who, after a discussion of Keatss other poems and his letters, feels that he knows what Keats meant by beauty and what he meant by truth, and that Keats used them in senses which allowed them to be properly bracketed together, still, is forced to conclude: My own opinion concerning the value of these two lines in the context of the poem itself is not very different from Mr. T. S. Eliots. The troubling assertion is apparently an intrusion upon the poem -- does not grow out of it-is not dramatically accommodated to it. This is essentially Garrods objection, and the fact that Garrod does object indicates that a distaste for the ending of the Ode is by no means limited to critics