Keats and the Senses of Being: Ode on a Grecian Urn (Stanza V) Essay

Keats and the Senses of Being Ode on a Grecian Urn (Stanza V)ABSTRACT 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 Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn is a particularly compelling subject for philosophical analysis. The major(ip) explications of this most contentiously debated ode in the language have largely focused, however, on various combinations of the poems stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological, aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide philosophical approach to the odes magnificently controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urns declaration Beauty is truth, truth beauty). I demonstrate how William Desmonds metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a hermeneutics of the in the midst of that elucidates the odes culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.In what ways are philosophy and literature inversely elucidating? More specifically, how can a systematic metaphysics serve as a vehicle of insight into the way that literary art renders, in solution as it were, ontological truths that orchestrate our experience of the ideal? Id like briefly to address these questions by considering the concluding stanza of John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn in terms of four complementary ontological keys. These four senses of being the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxologicalare the heart of a compelling ontology detailed by William Desmond in... ...n the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic news show that leaves the Du free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. (I and Thou 89).BibliographyBuber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York Scribners, 1970.Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany SUNY P, 1995.Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the proceeding of Art. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York Harper, 1975.Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London Penguin, 1988.Stambovsky, Phillip. The Depictive Image Metaphor and Literary Experience. Amherst, MA U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Myth and the Limits of Reason. Amsterdam and battle of Atlanta Rodopi, 1996.Stillinger, Jack, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keatss Odes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1968.