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Unit 6: Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

(a) “The child is father of the man.” Notes
(b) “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
(c) “A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and
rolls through all things.”
(d) “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle
to escape?

2. The poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes images of antiquity, not for their order,
balance, and harmony but rather for Romantic values. Keats finds the vase images
........................................
(a) dreamlike, tormented, and melancholic
(b) eternal, unchangeable, and silent
(c) ghastly, ghostly, and surreal

(d) erotic, suggestive, and ideal
3. English Romantic poet John Keats was born on ................................. in London.
(a) October 31, 1795 (b) November 07, 1799
(c) January 31, 1795 (d) December 01, 1879

4. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants,
................................... as his guardians.
(a) Richard and John (b) William and John

(c) James and Claire (d) Ruskin and Florida
5. John Keats died of ............................
(a) Aids (b) Fever
(c) Dengue (d) Tuberculosis

6.4 Summary

English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of
four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper,
died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his
mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard
Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. John Keats was an English Romantic poet.
He was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord
Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for
four years before his death.

The poem by John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is one of the most memorable and
enduring of all the poems to come from the Romantic Period.
From 1814 Keats had two bequests held in trust for him until his 21st birthday: £800 willed
by his grandfather John Jennings (about £34,000 in today’s money) and a portion of his
mother’s legacy, £8000 (about £340,000 today), to be equally divided between her living
children. It seems he was not told of either, since he never applied for any of the money.
Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may well have
also been unaware.

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