What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?
One of the most beloved poems by the English poet John Keats (1795-1821), ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819) is perhaps best known for its closing two lines:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Referring to the work as ‘arguably the best poem from arguably the best Romantic poet’, in this video essay Evan Puschak (aka the Nerdwriter) offers a stanza-by-stanza breakdown of Keats’s words, which revolve around a speaker contemplating the meaning of the images painted onto an ancient Grecian urn. Highlighting how the poem contrasts the ephemeral realities of life with the seemingly eternal beauty of art, Puschak makes an apropos case for the work’s own enduring power.
Video by The Nerdwriter
videoHistory of science
Insect aesthetics – long viewed as pests, in the 16th century bugs became beautiful
8 minutes
videoNature and landscape
After independence, Mexico was in search of identity. These paintings offered a blueprint
15 minutes
videoMathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
4 minutes
videoArt
A young Rockefeller collects art on a fateful journey to New Guinea
7 minutes
videoArchitecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
videoArt
Defying classification, fantastical artworks reframe the racism of Carl Linnaeus
8 minutes
videoFilm and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
videoArt
When East met West in the images of an overlooked, original photographer
9 minutes
videoEarth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes