Volume 21, 1998
Philosophy and Literature
Phillip Stambovsky
Pages 76-82
Keats and the Senses of Being
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Stanza V)
With its focus on the pathos of permanence versus temporality as human aporia and on the function — the Werksein — of the work of art genuinely encountered, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is a particularly compelling subject for philosophical analysis. The major explications of this most contentiously debated ode in the language have largely focused, however, on various combinations of the poem’s stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological, aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide philosophical approach to the ode’s famously controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urn’s declaration: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). I demonstrate how William Desmond’s metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the between" that elucidates the ode’s culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.