Where have all the flowers gone?

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
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.
-Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Stanza V

Is there anything of the Beautiful in the preceding stanza?




How about the Statue of Laocoon?

The readings for this week intimate that Beauty is the aim of the artistic enterprise, but leave us somewhat in the dark as to just exactly what Beauty is. We are told that it is the evidence of genius or captures the “Genius of an Age” but that doesn’t go a long way to making Beauty more concrete.
Keats gives us some help stating the “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” but even this seems a bit problematic for me. The language he uses to make this point is in itself artificial. Art - short for artifice – from whence artificial. Not too many people in the early 19th century spoke this way in common parlance. It is a special contrived language built for the conventions of poetry. In the statue of Laocoon his sons are not young boys, but miniaturized adults a convention of certain periods of art but not a direct correspondance with reality.
Perhaps then it is truth that needs some explaining. Keats is writing about an object at an exhibition. He concedes that it is a fixed and lifeless object, “Cold Pastoral” but it is also not lifeless at all. The figures decorating the urn take on a life for Keats. The maidens trying to escape their pursuers, the priest leading a cow to sacrifice. This is the human story. It signifies the real intellectual and emotional power of humanity. The truth is not in the relationship of the art to the thing it represents, they are inevitably divided sign to signifier, but the truth is in the reality of the moment the art seeks imperfectly to represent. Its human drama, its gravitas, its joy. Laocoon at the moment of surrendering life and watching or anticipating the suffering of his children. A moment of raw human power.
The poem itself is a frank celebration of the moment of appreciation. Keats feels the hand of the potter across millennia, communicating imperfectly moments that celebrate those things that make us human. “Thou silent form, dost tease us out of thought as does eternity:” In an economy of words, Urn, paintings, mindlessness, visceral response, eternity, death - all become present together in contrast and in juxtaposition. The vase’s eternity of artificial life becomes in Keats’ poem a celebration staving off death.
Beauty perhaps is not the best word for our cultural understanding with its loaded associations to the cult of youth and to physical presentations of the body. It also loses some of its wider connotations; awe, sublimity, terror, grotesque. Each of these has its own moment in the parade of human drama and each speaks with its own truth when reflected well in art; think Oedipus putting out his eyes, Lear on the heath, or Shelly overlooking the Ravine of Arve in “Mont Blanc.” Perhaps the appreciation of Beauty is our recognition of what is best in ourselves in the works we appraise and Genius in the author is her ability to approximate the human power of a real moment in the unstable metonymic structure of art.