ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the crisis of self-legitimation that emerges in Keats's parody of Enlightenment values of art in his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Assuming a literary text's integrity is axiomatic, and it is logically consistent with the view of poetry as a sort of metaphysical world, a view which undoubtedly can be traced to the nascent stages of a Lebensphilosophie in the early nineteenth century. Keats employs various formal means of intensifying the conflict of thought and language, of eternity and life of the ode. Most critics seem to agree that Keats uses two personae in the ode, which becomes apparent once the main narration is 'disrupted' by an oracular pronouncement in the final stanza. The urn's reported speech marks heighten this perception, irrespective of where they are placed. The process of circling around the urn might not seem sufficient to qualify as 'action' by some accounts.
