Beauty. Truth.

In thinking back to last semester, we talked one week with Dr. Schuler about a method used by authors who find themselves in poor or tragic times. They tend to write about the older glorious days. They are seizing the emotions of people who need hope in order to survive, and by reemphasizing a richer age, they are reviving hope in the reader. Likewise, when in prosperous times, authors reconstruct a darker past in writing, both in order to say, "Look at the progress we've made," as well as to remind the audience that society is not immortal. Each case evokes an aged and distant heart in the audience, giving a sense of escape, or a sense of danger.

Ironically, the Romantics were attempting to break trends and find a new way of life. They wrote in new forms, but the idea of revisiting a mystical past was irreplaceable. In his poetry, Keats simultaneously bleeds nostalgia and joy. Certainly, this is quite obvious in his vocabulary, where he vividly illustrates his happiness, but it is done with the same method of dramatizing the old world. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats scrapes the dust from ancient mythology, and immortalizes it with extreme detail. Stanza V stimulates the reader in this fashion, first addressing the urn as, "O Attic shape!" This tells the reader that the urn is from Athens, the jewel of the ancient Greek empire. Continuing on, it escalates the reader to realize that when the age of his or her own generation is lost, the Greeks will still be remembered for their Kleos, the thing each Greek hero desired, and that the ancient Greeks would continue to teach the pursuit of truth as the ultimate beauty.

Ad augusta per angusta,

Will