Keats and Poe: Time, Beauty and Truth

The Romantic era, as we have discussed in class, is characterized by the returning to nature, since it represents simplicity and a source of wisdom and inspiration. In that sense, every concept related to nature and unfiltered by human action, for instance, flowers, trees, landscapes, etc., was considered relevant for poets such as Keats, Whitman and Poe (Harvey, 2014). 

Having said that, we can assure that Romantic poets have many traits in common regarding certain topics. Those topics are mainly truth, beauty and time. 

Bearing that in mind, I wanted to raise awareness of the relationship of truth, beauty and time within two main works. John Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn and Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

First of all, it results necessary to summarize each work: 

On the one hand, in "Ode to a Grecian Urn", there is a speaker who actually describes an ancient Grecian urn. He/she refers to the characters that tell different stories, even when they are "frozen in time", and the speaker wonders about those stories. Besides, he/she states that their static traits will lead to beauty that will never fade in comparison with what surrounds the speaker at that moment.

On the other hand, "The Tell-Tale Heart" refers to a man who confesses the crime of killing an elderly man who presumably lived with him. The excuse that the man gave was because he was obsessed with his eye, as we can notice in the following extract:

"I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”

(Poe, 1843)

The main character, also known as the murderer, used to visit the old man every night and observed him while he slept. One day, the man wakes up in the middle of the night and noticed that there was someone in his bedroom. Then, the young man attacked him, chop his body and buried the corpse in the same bedroom. The next day, the police arrived to the house looking for the old man since a neighbor heard some strange noise the previous night. The young man showed the house trying not to look suspicious. Indeed, he led them to the same room where there was the corpse. Finally, the murderer started to hear a sound pretty similar to the old man's heart beat so he felt frightened since he believed the police officers also noticed that sound. In the end, he confessed the crime and showed where the body was.

After summarizing the main ideas of each text, some similar points can be highlighted.

In Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, there is a paradox between what beauty means. As we saw in class, the central thought of him was that the essence of things is always transient, for example, a flower, that is beautiful but it will eventually die. Besides, beautiful things are beautiful because they are not permanent. If they last forever, they would not be real and thus, they would lose what make us consider them as beautiful. In that sense, we can establish a deep connection among an object, its presence in the real world (or what makes it real and hence, true), and the traits that transforms it into a beautiful piece. 

Keats suggests that the concept of beauty brings more ideas, such as, softness, something delicate, pleasant and temporary, like the smell of a perfume or the vision of the sunset. However, as we can see in Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats seems to consider something astonishing when it is frozen in time, lifeless or artificial (Smith, 2011).

On the other hand, Poe has an absolute vision about beauty as it has been mentioned in class. He believed that the closer he gets to death, the more inhuman and the closer he gets to obsession. That obsessions are lead by beauty. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the murdered was obsessed with the elderly man's eye so he wanted to preserve it in a way. Bearing that in mind, I would say murderers in many of Poe's stories want to freeze a moment of something that called their attention by killing someone or by challenging rules of nature (as in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, in which he wanted to be hypnotized in order to avoid death and maintain himself "alive"). 

The main idea that I want to highlight after stating all these points is that Keats's and Poe's views about truth, beauty and how they are affected by time are pretty similar. 

In order to conclude with this post, I want to share a Youtube video which called my attention. Annette Jung, an illustrator and comic-artist, tells Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart in a kind of creepy way that shows us how obsessed the murderer was.

My final question is: Can you perceive another conception of beauty or truth in other Poe's stories, such as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven, or Mesmeric Revelation?

And as a bonus track, and regarding Gustavo's death, I wanted to share this song by Soda Stereo called "Corazón Delator". 

References:

Harvey, B. (2014). American Romanticism Overview. Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~mmcfar/AMERICAN%20ROMANTICISM%20overview.htm#_ftnref1

Keats, J. (1819). Ode to a Grecian Urn. Retrieved from Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173742

Poe, E. A. (1843). The Tell-Tale Heart. Retrieved from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/POE/telltale.html

Smith, N. (2011, December 7th). Explanation and Analysis of “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. Retrieved from Article Myriad: http://www.articlemyriad.com/analysis-ode-grecian-urn-keats/