Ode on a Greciarn Urn

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Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats Born: 31-Oct-1795 Birthplace: Finsbury Pavement, London, England Died: 23-Feb-1821 Location of death: Rome, Italy Cause of death: Tuberculosis Remains: Buried, Campo Cestio, Rome, Italy Father: (stable keeper, d. 1803 after fall from horse) Mother: (d. 1810 tuberculosis) Brother: Tom Keats (d. 1818 tuberculosis) Author of books: Poems (1817, poetry) Endymion (1818, poetry) The Fall of Hyperion (1819-21, poetry) Lamia, Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820, poetry) • John Keats was one of the greatest British Romantic poets, but he didn't have a long career like earlier generation Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. • Written in 1819, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was the third of the five 'great odes' of 1819, which are generally believed to have been written in the following order – o Psyche, o Nightingale, o Grecian Urn, o Melancholy and o Autumn. • Of the five, Grecian Urn and Melancholy are merely dated '1819'. Critics have used vague references in Keats's letters as well as thematic progression to assign order. • He told his friends that he felt like a living ghost, and it’s not surprising that the speaker of the poem should be so obsessed with the idea of immortality. • The poem consists of a person talking to a kind of fancy Greek pot known as an "urn" that was made of marble. Summary • Imagine walking into a room of a museum and seeing a young man talking to an ancient pot. • He talks to the urn as if it were a beautiful woman, like many people do nowadays with their cars. He calls her the "unravish’d bride of quietness," which, if taken literally, would mean that the urn is married to a guy named Quietness. • The urn is called the "foster-child" of Silence and slow Time. A "foster-child" is a kid who is adopted and raised by people other than his

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