ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the crisis of self-legitimation that emerges in John Keats parody of Enlightenment values of art in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ It argues that hermeneutic aporia is a product of the shift from the age-old understanding of human creativity in terms of causality, in which the artist is a maker of a work of art, to a more organic understanding of creativity as a function of ‘life’. The ode’s formal incoherence has invited the application of a different hermeneutic of reading than would have been warranted if the poem had been more transparent to understanding, as it would have been had it been intended as a determined ‘work of art.’ The change in ‘scenes’ in the stanzas is represented in the structure of the ode architectonically stanza by stanza. The speaker’s movement is implicit in the changing Keats’s he describes confronting him.
