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

Keats and the Senses of Being Ode on a Greek Urn (Stanza V)ABSTRACT With its cogitate 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 summary. The major 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 entree to the odes famously controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urns annunciation 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 existence-affords the groundwork for a hermeneutics of the between that elucidates the odes culminating stanza with all of the cogency and tincture that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology.In what fashions are philosophy and literature mutually 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 machinate our experience of the ideal? Id like briefly to actors line 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 battle cry that leaves the Du free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not plain itself but is. (I and Thou 89).BibliographyBuber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walte r Kaufmann. New York Scribners, 1970.Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany SUNY P, 1995.Heidegger, Martin. The root system of the Work 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 representational Image Metaphor and Literary Experience. Amherst, MA U of Massachusetts P, 1988. allegory and the Limits of Reason. Amsterdam and Atlanta Rodopi, 1996.Stillinger, Jack, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keatss Odes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1968.