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James O'Rourke, "Introduction to 'Ode
on a Grecian Urn': Hypercanonicity & Pedagogy"
O'Rourke asks a diverse group of professors of Romanticism what might
look like the most routine pedagogical question: How do you teach the
'Ode on a Grecian Urn?'" The energy and ingenuity with which the contributors
to this volume addressed this question gives some sense of the range and
the subtlety of the ways in which the enigmas that Keats confronted in
a silent urn are being recreated in American (and New Zealand) classrooms.
[go to "Introduction"]
David Collings, "Suspended Satisfaction:
'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and the Construction of Art"
This essay examines how Keats heightens the tension implicit in commodity
consumption—the fact that no object can satisfy the desire one hopes
to fulfill by purchasing it—when he suspends satisfaction outright.
The urn thus becomes that impossible, absent object itself, the sublime
object that forever remains beyond reach. Yet in his account, those who
encounter the urn are not frustrated but rather experience the paradoxical
bliss of anticipating what will never be fulfilled. Collings further explores
how Keats renders the urn into the exemplary aesthetic artifact; he can
idealize the urn to this extent only because he relies on the gesture
whereby the museum severs the urn from historical reference and places
it in a zone of atemporal, "eternal" significance. The temporal suspension
represented in the images on the urn and in its unchanging message to
mortal beings perfectly exemplify the ideology of the museum; the truth
the urn teaches has no content but simply returns to viewers the eternity
they attribute to it.
[go to essay]
Helen Regueiro Elam, "Remembering to Die"
Critical tradition has tended to read this Ode as the poet's triumph
over the power of mortality—a power by which he is besieged and to
which he responds in his other Odes. This essay suggests that especially
in this Ode, where the art object places itself "far above"
passion and death, Keats is intensely aware of the indispensible power
of mortality as the very source of eros and art.
[go to essay]
Spencer Hall, "Keat's Widely-Taught and
Well-Wrought 'Urn''"
Hall notes the place of Keats's "Urn" in a variety of graduate
and undergraduate pedagogies but focuses on the poem's usefulness in teaching
students how to "read." Depending on the kind of class, he emphasizes
formalist or deconstructionist techniques of close textual analysis. Often
juxtaposing the "Urn" with "Ode to a Nightingale"
and paying careful attention to the ambiguities of syntax, grammar, and
vocabulary, he works back from the poems' endings to demonstrate and identify
structure, theme, and tone. Keats's "negative capability" letter
and Coleridge's statement on "the balance or reconciliation of opposite
or discordant qualities" are often introduced in this context. In
advanced classes, the "Urn" is subjected to a more deconstructive
and antithetical mode of reading that foregrounds the problematic nature
of Romantic notions of symbol and embodiment. Hall places such problems
in the context of second-generation British Romanticism.
[go to essay]
David P. Haney, "Hermeneutics for Sophomores"
Grounding his reading in the hermeneutic tradition, Haney argues that
Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" can be productively taught to non-English
majors as an exploration of the interpretive processes at work in the
poem itself and in our historically mediated relationship to the poem.
Such an approach runs counter to narrowly ideological readings while still
emphasizing the historicity of interpretation. Unstated assumptions about
both students' and poets' interpretive practices are brought to the surface
as students list and discuss the interpretive difficulties and ambiguities
faced by both the speaker of the poem and the reader. Students explore
both their shared horizon with the poem's speaker and the otherness implicit
in that act of sharing. This necessarily incomplete struggle to achieve
a shared understanding helps to teach the value of interpretive self-consciousness.
[go to essay]
John Kandl, "The Timeless in Its Time:
Engaging Students in a Close-reading and Discussion of the Historical
Contexts of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'"
For Kandl, In discussions of hypercanonical works, often presented as
"timeless," it is useful for students to grapple with ways in which such
a work can be reconstituted within its historical moment. Is the work
a deeply felt personal expression, a public, political statement, or a
work of timeless art transcending the historical and biographical? Kandl's
goal is to allow for a discussion encompassing all of these registers
simultaneously. Naturally, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" presents a remarkably
rich site in which to explore these tensions. By opening up possibilities
of interpretation and understanding beyond the aesthetic boundaries of
the work in itself, students begin to see that works of art, particularly
hypercanonical works, may give way to a multitude of possible, responsible
readings, dependent on the version of the work one is reading and in what
particular context(s). Indeed the continued hypercanonical status of a
work like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" may be owing to the poem's uncanny ability
to comply with various readings, to be several works at once.
[go to essay]
Bridget Keegan, "Teaching Like An Urn"
Keegan describes how "Ode on a Grecian Urn" serves as a key
text to model for first-year undergraduates how they might begin to readjust
their strategies and expectations in analyzing literature. Keats's poem
productively stresses the equal importance of questions and questioning
when approaching a poem or a work of art.
[go to essay]
Brennan O'Donnell, "Three or Four
Ways of Looking at an Urn"
In the undergraduate classroom, the "hypercanonized" "Urn"
needs first to be de-familiarized and re-presented as a dynamic, self-conflicted,
and fruitfully perplexing artifact that explores love and loss, art and
life, confidence and doubt, permanence and temporality, feeling and thinking
in ways that can touch upon students' own experience and might even move
them in some significant way. In this essay, such an approach challenges
a view of poetry that seems to be increasingly prevalent, according to
which a poem is more or less an elaborate code and reading a process of
discovering "hidden meaning." Awakening students to a lively
appreciation of the surface of the poem and to the possibilities that
the poem means exactly what (and everything that) it says can be an end
in itself (in the introductory course) or can underlie other approaches,
more concerned with historical, philosophical, or psychological approaches.
[go to essay]
Jeffrey C. Robinson, "Deforming Keats's
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'"
To deform a poem is to intervene significantly in the poem's physical
structure (e.g. reading the poem backwards, reading only nouns) in order
to highlight features of the poem not easily noticeable. In this essay,
a famous poem like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" shows how such an activity
makes one aware how too easily we "pre-read" the poem. This is particularly
true of our sense of its narrative from question to answer, from passion
to cool friendship.
[go to essay]
Jack Stillinger, "Fifty-nine Ways
of Reading 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'"
Twentieth-century reading and criticism of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" began
with author biography and relatively mindless "appreciation" of the beauties
of individual pictorial details. It made great progress as a result of
New Critical emphasis on "close reading," which uncovered irony, paradox,
and ambiguity in the syntax and images. It gained further sophistication
with the advent of several types of literary theory—in particular,
Deconstruction (which gave legitimacy to the poem's incoherence and indeterminacy),
New Historicism (which brought out hidden political concerns), Feminism
(which focused more specifically on the sexual politics), and Reader-Response
criticism (which showed not only the feasibility but the inevitability
of diverse readings)—all of which opened up possibilities for additional
meanings in the poem and therefore increasingly multiple, complex, and
even contradictory responses from its readers. The result for teaching
the poem in the twenty-first century has been to sanction open-endedness,
admire Keats all the more as the genius who provided such rich materials
to work with, and free the classroom forever from the narrowness of single-meaning
interpretation laid on the students by well-intentioned instructors.
[go to essay]
Heidi Thomson, "Teaching 'Ode on a
Grecian Urn' in New Zealand"
Thomson reflects on her experience of teaching Keats's "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" as part of a third-year, twelve-week survey course on English Romantic
Literature in the School of English, Film, and Theatre at Victoria University
of Wellington, New Zealand. Her students are generally not burdened with
preconceptions about Keats's canonicity. On the contrary, most students
are favorably disposed towards Keats's youthfulness and his passionate
intensity. In the classroom Thomson addresses the same issue which informs
her own research about Keats: his ability to express the necessity to
substantiate desire into a passion which lasts beyond the moment by focusing
on the dynamics and the energy of encounters. Thomson's teaching approach
is particularly influenced by the pedagogy of Stillinger and Baym; lectures
and tutorials are devoted to Keats's literary and cultural context, with
a particular emphasis on the importance of reading and the attempts to
formulate a response to reading in Keats's work. An additional focus on
the politics of museums highlights the complexities of context for an
artefact such as the grecian urn. In terms of pedagogy and teaching content,
Thomson emphasizes creative reconstruction: "Truth" is always "the truth
of the imagination" in its pursuit of a desired vision.
[go to essay]
Susan J. Wolfson, "The Know of Not
to Know It: My Returns to Reading and Teaching Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian
Urn'"
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" repays pleasurable labors of careful
reading, not as a search for information or an occasion for exposures
of ideology, but as a tracking and tracing of language as event, as field
of play, as a discovery of indeterminacy in the desire for determinations.
Keats mobilizes the ode's linguistic activity—of words, of syntaxes,
of poetic forms—to shape for his reader an analogue for his speaker's
encounter with the figures and configurations on the urn, an encounter
described in projections of desire that fail to tease out a certain or
stable legend for understanding. This reflexiveness involves not only
a phenomenology of reading (Wolfgang Iser's phrase for the unfolding of
meaning and meanings) but also (in ways that don't always interest Iser)
ironic relays on the frustrations of reading. The ode's inception in questions
leads to a witty interrogative trial of contradictions and, ultimately,
an answer that is no answer, but a circular statement ("Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty") that, for all its subsequent canonization, including a
chiseling on the walls of the Library of Congress, turns out to be as
baffling as the circular urn itself.
[go to essay]
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