Evil is Truth, Truth, Evil
Uploaded by Enirambus on Mar 04, 2002
John Keats brilliantly uses poetic form and descriptive language to attempt to evoke interest in an inherently uninteresting subject, as well as support a hidden agenda, with his poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. The three primary tools Keats uses, from which we can analyze his strategy, are the title of the poem, diction conforming to rhyme scheme, and literary devices.
The title of the poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” seems at first innocuous and meaningless, but when analyzed at greater depth, sinister meaning becomes evident. Each word in the title has meaning. First, we see that he used the word “Ode” in the title, blatantly stating the poetic form of his work. This makes assumptions about the audience, the first of which being that they are too ignorant to discern for themselves the poetic form of the poem. The second reason for the word “Ode” in the title is to make firm in the reader’s mind that the poem will praise the urn as its primary function. The next word, “on”, is an odd choice for the title. It would make more sense to use the word “to” (Ode to a Grecian Urn); Keats wanted to tie the title to the final two lines, that the true ode (the poetry) is actually ON the Grecian Urn. Perhaps he intended this as a sort of double meaning to his poem, it would come as little surprise from such an odd thinker as he. The third word, “a”, serves an obvious meaning: to establish that there is only one of these Urns, perhaps cementing the uniqueness of the Urn. The fourth word comes as a surprise as well- why did he not simply use the adjective “Greek”? In the Webster’s New World Dictionary, “Greek” is defined as “of ancient or modern Greece, its people, language or culture,” whereas “Grecian” is defined as “1) a Greek 2) a scholar of Greek.” The word “Grecian” is obviously not an adjective, merely a noun, and as such makes the sentence incomprehensible to standard conventions of English. Enter adjectivizing. This practice occurs once writers run out of good adjectives; they take perfectly elf nouns and make those hippopotamus nouns into adjective nouns. This works with verbing as well. In the previous sentence, the noun “verb” was verbed. Either Keats was an ignoramus who thought “Grecian” was an adjective, or he did it on purpose....