Keats, Urn, and Rousseau's First Discourse Essay

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Rousseau’s First Discourse and Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” both focus on Beauty as the sole arbiter of Truth and the only guide through life that society really needs. Yet each work is different because they both come to different conclusions: Rousseau’s treatise is a work of philosophical speculation that essentially rejects beauty and truth (justifying this rejection by referencing the words of Socrates no less), while Keats’ work is a poetic affirmation of the power of Beauty and Truth as guideposts for mankind. Rousseau spends much of the Discourse disabusing his contemporaries of the notion that the work of civilization (i.e.—the arts and sciences) is in any way conducive to happiness, progress or greatness. He literally extols “ignorance” (Rousseau 10) and essentially promotes the concept of the “noble savage”—that man in his natural state is sublime and beautiful and good and that it is society with its codes and moral parameters displayed through the arts and sciences that keeps man enslaved and from achieving his perfect state of happiness (i.e.—from embracing of his nature). Thus, Rousseau rejected the moral and traditional codes (especially of the Church, which taught that human nature was fallen and that man, suffering from the consequences of Original Sin, was in need of saving grace to reach a state of perfect happiness—possible only through union with God). Rousseau was for the Self. Keats differs in that he sings of Beauty, adopts a more spiritual and less philosophical tone in his poem and asserts that Beauty is indeed good for society (and in this sense he is more in line with the traditional Western, religious creed). His work is not based on rejecting the teachings of the past so much as it is on accepting the limitations of the rational mind. Rousseau also rejects the “rational” to the extent that he embraces the primal mystery of feeling—but with Keats, there is a sense of respect that the poet has for the kind of Truth that the Old World philosophers, poets, and teachers would also have respected. At least, it is not dismissed by Keats. This paper will compare and contrast the two works by these two Romantics and show how they are similar yet different as they approach the theme of Beauty and what it means.

In 1750, when Rousseau penned his First Discourse, France had not yet shuffled off the mortal coil of its Catholic hierarchy. The monarchy was still in existence and the Revolution was still some years off. The same could not be said for Keats’ England. It had thrown off its attachment to the Catholic See under Henry V a few centuries earlier. For Rousseau, the attack against civilization (arts and sciences) was more or less an attack on the Western Tradition, the faith of the Church, and a rebuke to the Rational Enlightenment that had assumed a Church-like authority on parts of the Continent.

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Rousseau was not for promoting more of the kind of rationalistic dogmas that had already had their day. He was for promoting a self-centered theology—a theology of the Self—a philosophy that supported a new concept of Nature (or rather a pre-Christian one) in which Sin and Fall had no place. Keats, on the other hand, being part of a culture that had already thrown off its heritage and erected something new in its place, was not so keen on rebuking his culture and society as he was on reaching back to those old ways of looking at things that helped give meaning to life in the first place. Both poets, were appealing to the words of the ancients (in particularly Socrates)—yet both were drawing different conclusions from that appeal. Rousseau was saying, see, even Socrates said not to hold up the One, the True, the Good and the Beautiful as ideals (because no one in reality knows what they are)—so take that Western Civilization. Keats, contrarily, was saying, Beauty is Truth (and you certainly can know what it is)—and that is the only ideal that one needs to live by. Rousseau asserted that man was ignorant and should embrace his ignorance; Keats was reminding man that he still had his senses, and his senses could indeed inform him of Beauty and therefore of Truth. Rousseau appealed to Socrates in order to state, “So there you have the wisest of men in the judgment of the gods and the most knowledgeable Athenian in the opinion of all of Greece, Socrates, singing the praises of ignorance” (Rousseau 10). Keats appealed to Socrates as well—but not in defense of ignorance. Is it safe to say that the two men were interpreting the philosopher in two different ways? Quite. Rousseau was taking the philosopher out of context—for Socrates never affirmed that it was impossible to know Truth or Beauty but only that many men said they knew these ideals when, in fact (and upon closer examination of their words and actions), they often revealed that they knew next to nothing of them. Keats appears to have understood Socrates’ lesson in its larger context, which is why that lesson informs his poetry—which in and of itself serves as a reminder to the reader to not forget that “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’….....

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