The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited James Dowthwaite Introduction As a philosophical disposition, posthumanism has led to a broad expansion of critical awareness of the relationality of the human and human perspectives. In literary studies, for example, it calls attention to the ways that consciousness is not solipsistic, bounded self-reflection, but is constituted in relation to environment, to atmosphere, to other minds, known or imputed, and to objects. Objects, in particular, have been promoted to crucial status by posthumanism. And yet this broad expansion does come up against limits, particularly in literary studies. Posthuman literary accounts tend to elide an important element in the ontology of objects in literary works: the human imagination. In how far can we really call objects in novels, poems, playscripts (even props in performances, constituted as they are within an aesthetic performance) ‘nonhuman’? For Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, the aim of posthumanism hardly seems far from the central concerns of humanism: “to read in a posthuman way is to read against one’s self, against one’s own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or even representative of a certain ‘species’” (2008: 95). This oppositional reading, however, still has the human being at the centre, even if the self-awareness might lead to a better appreciation of where human influence - if we can still speak of such a thing in a posthuman tradition - leaves off and objects begin their collaborative work in the interpretative world. Pieter Vermeulen lauds what he calls the shift from “human emotion to posthuman affect” (2014: 121). While this may be useful in accounting for our relationality regarding nonhuman objects, it is too staid a stance to account for lyric poetry, for example, particularly in modern traditions, where emotion, as a humanised concept, is at the centre. Is emotion, for example, not a better word for Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night” (1814), William Butler Yeats’s “The Moods” (1899), or, to give a prose example, that which the titular character represses in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)? Emotion, I suggest, better DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 captures the human aspect, because of its relative freedom from theories, material and metaphysical. And this sense of humanisation is central to much writing throughout literary history, including that which centres around objects. The limits of affect, for example, can be seen in poems such as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), a work which is ostensibly about an object, but in which, as the poem advances towards its dramatic end, the urn appears to express itself: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede --------Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; ---------Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! ---------When old age shall this generation waste, --------------- Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, ---------“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all --------------- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”. (2009a: 178, 41-50) This essay argues that Keats’s poem offers a complicated case for posthuman conceptions of the nonhuman, and that the object is contingent on the human imagination conceiving it. Such an imaginative object cannot be so readily conceived as nonhuman. Keats’s famous dictum, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is well known, and remains controversial. That this is imagined to have been spoken by an inanimate object is striking, and the poem in fact hinges on what it is that this object says. This object is, of course, a particular kind of object, an artwork, which for Keats gives it a particular status, and therefore also a particular authority in commenting on matters of truth and beauty. The whole poem can be seen as an exploration of the kind of communication that an artwork can give: in the case of the urn, it speaks silently, over millennia - communication that is markedly different from our own, because if it is to speak, it is only by our imputation. And yet Keats’s urn is especially complex in that it is not only an artistic object, but is the subject of poetic imagination: The urn is fictitious, and is used throughout the poem to investigate the nature of art and what it is that art might say to us, were it able to speak. On the surface, we would appear to have a strong case of a human-nonhuman interaction here. In a recent special issue of Textual Practice, Laura Colombino and Peter Childs provide a concise and enlightening account of how the ‘nonhuman’ has become a central concern of literary studies. They assess the situation thus: DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 50 James Dowthwaite Moving away from the Western cultural prioritisation of the human(ist) subject, such a turn combats anthropocentrism by considering the human as an object among other objects (as in object-oriented philosophy and the speculative realism of Meillassoux and Brassier), or as one body among other bodies (in new materialism), or as one form of matter among the diversity of material in the universe (Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’), or one form of agency within a myriad of energies and organic developments (as elaborated in Bookchin’s social ecology). (2022: 356) Colombino’s and Childs’s account is rich with detail from contemporary lit‐ erature, reflecting the contributions to the issue, and they demonstrate the centrality of the philosophical task of shifting away from anthropocentric models of literary thinking. Within this, they highlight the importance of con‐ sciousness, writing that “while consciousness remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of science, despite attempts to explain it through computer models or as an epiphenomenon of brain activity, its extension to nonhuman entities is increasingly at the core of literary creativity” (359 f.). The “imaginative leap”, as they usefully term it, of this conceptual attempt to imagine the consciousness of the nonhuman is of crucial importance for human-nonhuman interaction. They argue that it inculcates a “proximity and empathy” which “can be perceived as having an empowering, transformative potential, which may liberate us from enduring cultural constraints and binary paradigms of domination” (360). But the watchword remains “may”. Too often we act as if these are foregone critical conclusions. The focus on contemporary literature is sensible, of course, as the purpose of their special issue is to investigate current concerns and future directions, but criticism need not obey the pressured, narrow timeline of current events for its frameworks and symbols. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most famous literary examples of human-nonhuman interaction, and it is striking that the consciousness imparted to the nonhuman is the central event on which the poem hinges. Keats’s urn complicates the idea of the object. Joseph Tabbi, in his Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism (2024) offers a milder vision of posthu‐ manism than Herbrechter and Callus, and than Vermeulen, arguing that “it is possible to view the posthuman as signalling not so much a break with our human nature (if that could ever have been settled) as a carrying forward and questioning of humanism into the current era” (2024: 2). Tabbi clarifies that posthumanism is “a reconstruction and medial relocation of the human mind itself, in relation to other minds and to objects that are newly approached and identified through distributed networks and nonhuman, medial affordances” (60). But the issue is what one does with literary objects, that is, objects which are imagined or fictional, constituted not by their material existence, but by DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 51 1 Two counter examples to this tendency might be Joseph Campana’s and Scott Mai‐ sano’s Renaissance Posthumanism (2016) and Francesca Spiegel’s and Giulia Maria Chesi’s-Classical Literature and Posthumanism-(2021). These works, however, insist on the relevance of posthumanist theory for situating classical works in relation to our thought today - a valuable enterprise in its own right, of course - more than they derive posthuman sensibilities from the works themselves. their subsistence within the aesthetic of the artwork. In all this, one might well ask whether the objects of literary works, for example, can be considered with the same materialist ontology as nonhuman objects in the world. The case is complicated even further by poems like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which the object is explicitly posited as a work of the imagination. The question that I pose at the end is, then, in how far posthuman ontologies of objecthood are applicable to literary works. Posthuman literary studies is in rude health, and my aim is not to challenge its numerous contributions to broad thematic questions. Sanna Karkulehto et al. give a strong demonstration of posthumanism’s contribution to literature: “narratives, cultures, and their constituents” are, they claim, “instruments of mind”, “which can help us humans to construct more nuanced and ethical relationships not only with each other but also with nonhumans” (2020: 9). Posthumanism, on this view, “can offer ways to view different nonhuman material entities escape and defy our human desire for narrative logics and descriptions” (16). The problem is that the essays collected in their edited collection, though they demonstrate this skill consummately, are really only concerned with contemporary works of fiction, in which human-nonhuman relationships are expressly thematised. The same can be said of a recent special issue of English Studies, edited by Başak Ağın and Z. Gizem Yılmaz on ‘Posthumanism and English Studies’ (2025). The essays therein are sensitive and expansive, generous accounts of what nonhuman subjectivities may tell us, but the discussion is limited to those areas where these aspects are expressly thematised: fantasy, science fiction, contemporary fiction in the wake of the apparent posthuman ‘turn’. The rest of the wide breadth of English literature is left largely untouched. 1 In their introduction, Ağın and Yılmaz write that posthumanism is not a limitation of the human being but instead “the generative assemblages of the more-than-human forces that make up and have always made up what we considered to be human” (2025: 648 f.). A fine aim, one may conclude, but does it not depend on a limited - and one might even say arbitrarily limited - conception of where the limits of the human are in art if we can speak of the more-than-human? Such a conception, I contend, will not hold in the case DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 52 James Dowthwaite of Keats’s urn, in which the forces that make it up remain human, even when it itself speaks. Keats’s urn: Post-Humanist criticism The speaking of the urn has proven a controversial artistic decision on Keats’s part. T. S. Eliot, for one, was not convinced. In his 1929 essay “Dante” he laid down an interpretative challenge to Keats: “On re-reading the whole Ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue” (59). Eliot, though seemingly baffled, does hint at a general strategy of handling the contention at the end of the poem: that Keats’s meanings of “truth” and “beauty” are idiosyncratic, or perhaps metonymic. Perhaps we might translate them into ‘reality’ and ‘perception’, or ‘intellect’ and ‘emotion’. Translated into more phenomenological terms - poetry, translated, then into phenomenology - might Keats be saying that mind and body are one? Eliot’s interpretation was challenged by the New Critic Cleanth Brooks. Brooks pointed out that Eliot makes the mistake of assuming that it is Keats speaking, rather than a persona, and that the persona who speaks is not a person, but an inanimate object which, the poem tells us from its outset, is by definition silent. The poem thus hinges on a paradox, which is that a necessarily silent object speaks, and we lose the meaning of the poem if we abstract away from this concrete dramatic situation: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ has precisely the same status, and the same justification as Shakespeare's ‘Ripeness is all’. It is a speech ‘in character’ and supported by a dramatic context” (1947: 165). Although I am in broad sympathy with Brooks’s reading, the contention of this essay is that he, too, makes a category error. Brooks is correct that the speaking persona, a nonhuman, is all-important, and that the speaking of the urn is the most significant aspect of this poem. He is also correct that the silence of the urn in the rest of the poem is to be measured against its speaking at the end, and that the impossible act of the object raising its voice should motivate all subsequent interpretations. But there are two aspects of his argument that need correction, pedantic though it may seem. The first is the assumption that the urn offers a singular proposition: that truth and beauty are one and the same. This is, in fact, only the first of three propositions. The others are that this is “all [we] know on earth”, and that this is “all [we] need to know”. In many ways, these claims are more controversial even than the identity of truth and beauty. The second - and most important for what follows - assumption is the idea that the urn speaks. This is not something that is proven in the poem; instead, what DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 53 2 See also 63-86 for a general outline of Latour’s argument for the agency of objects. we have is an imputed speech, an imagined act of dialogue on the part of an inanimate object. What Brooks leaves out of his otherwise brilliant analysis is that this is not a silent urn that speaks but rather a human being who imagines a silent urn speaking. The object is transformed into an articulate being by an act of human imagination, and it is this imagination that needs to be restored not only to Keats’s poem but, I will reflect at the end, to our conception of objects in literary works. My argument is that Keats’s urn is a very particular kind of object: an imagined, and therefore human, object. I make this claim at a time after which the advent of new materialism has led to a grand rethinking of the ontological status of objects. In line with posthumanism and transhumanism, critics are encouraged no longer to conceive of objects as adjuncts, extensions or symbols of an anthropocentric world. At the very least since Bruno Latour insisted that objects are the co-creators, “literally - not metaphorically”, as he claims, building society, the longstanding dualisms of subject-object, human-nonhuman have been severely shaken (1993: 54). Latour puts this most strongly in Reassembling the Social, stressing that this role as co-creator of the social world means that objects have agency as actants, or things that have an effect, and produce affect. They constitute the world no less than we do, so goes the argument, and thus have agency, ‘take action’ in a world of theory that repudiates ideas of freedom (2005: 72). 2 That is, it challenges the existentialist concept of freedom being the constitutive condition of humanity; instead, we are granted only the sense that, as bodies in the world, we have the agency of influencing other bodies, to which we are intimately, indelibly bound. Latour’s point can be well taken but there is a slight complication with Keats’s urn. On the surface, the poem might serviceably be used to demonstrate Latour’s theory: Is not the speaker also spoken to, in a manner of speaking, by the urn? Does it not have an effect on him or her? This could conceivably be the object’s agency. A reconsideration of the poem from a Latourian perspective could very much help us to move away from the anthropomorphic conception of objects as adjuncts, extensions, and symbols. But therein lies the issue: Are we not running the risk of conceiving of adjuncts, extensions, and symbols as objects? Is the urn really an object in the sense that Latour means? The nonhuman approach to the traditional purview of the humanities has, of course, different directions, but what these all share is a decentring of anthropomorphic assumptions. Braidotti’s vision of posthumanism is based on an expansion of the human being beyond what she sees as the limits of traditional humanism, with its Euroand Anthropo-centrism. She embeds the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 54 James Dowthwaite 3 Haraway’s “speculative fabulations” might offer some resonance with Keats’s approach, but even there her focus is more on the model of the real than on the symbolic forms of the imagination. human being in a broader world, relational to other species, other objects, other forces, more porous and open to the world (2010: 49). Donna Haraway, in works such as the Companion Species Manifesto (2003) or Staying with the Trouble (2016), also offers a critical vision which embeds human beings in a broader world, populated by other “critters”, as she calls them. 3 Following Braidotti and Haraway, one might be tempted to reconsider the agency of the urn as a companion species of a kind, with agency and modes of expression, simply different to our own. All of this might be evident in Keats’s approach but there is a fundamental issue, which is that the human being is at the centre of his poem. Keats’s poem is a work of the imagination - the human imagination - and the object with which it deals is immensely complicated by its being an imagined object. So complicated is Keats’s urn, that it is difficult to apply any theoretical model of human-nonhuman relations to it without committing the critical error against which Brooks warned. What I mean is this: Keats’s urn is not a nonhuman object in the sense that posthumanism usually conceives one, and so poses an issue for a wholesale adaptation of posthuman objecthood for literary studies. Even allowing for the simulating power of fictionality, which would make us see the urn as a fictional (or fictionalised) version of a real - or possible - object, we would be in critical error. The urn is characterised by its impossibility; it performs a series of aesthetic tasks which it can only perform by virtue of being an imagined object. Keats relies entirely on the ways in which the object breaks the boundaries of what is physically possible, in ways I will demonstrate below, meaning that imputing a model of the nonhuman derived from posthumanist entanglements is not only difficult, but undesirable. To do so would be to destroy the aesthetic imagined object as it “really is”, to quote Matthew Arnold (1865: 9) and Walter Pater (2010: 4). The relation in the poem is between the speaker and the imagined object, as imagined - not simulated real - object. In other words, what Keats creates in the poem is a humanised object. It is not human, that is why the urn cannot speak and why its imputed speech at the end remains only imputed, but it is also not nonhuman in the sense that contemporary theory conceives of objects; it has no agency beyond what the speaker imputes to it. It remains arbitrary, created, and therefore aesthetic, and therefore “beautiful” as the speaker of the poem would understand it. And so what of the relation between theoretical turns of the past half century and Keats’s work? Like many Romantic writers, Keats is at the centre of debates DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 55 4 For an account relating Keats to contemporaneous notions of disinterestedness, see Khalip (2006). around materialism, particularly regarding the affective elements of his “life of sensations” (Keats 2009b: 36). Forest Pyle argues that Keats’s work displays a materialism of its own, different from the assumptions of the historical materialist school which underwrote many of the critical assumptions of the late twentieth century (1994: 58). This materialism implies that the physicality of the objects in his poems, such as the urn, should be at the forefront of the critical imaginary, and less their symbolic or conceptual value. Gillian Beer argues that in “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “the objects worshipped are outside the poet’s self, each inhabiting a world impervious to his psyche”. The urn, she argues, inhabits “a world of inanimate artistic form” (1969: 744). We might see this as an example of an idealistic ascesis but applied to the material world. 4 Shahidha Bari has gone a little further, arguing that Keats’s “Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts” is a life imagined “in which sensation is not mindless or purely epicurean but which constitutes, for him, a different, non-‘consequitive’ kind of thinking” (2012: xix). Bari’s sensitive and moving account of the importance of “touch” as the embodiment of relationships, between Keats and others, between readers and the poetry, between art and philosophy, allows us to see a more expansive vision of this “life of sensations” as pertinent to materialism as a philosophical disposition. Her commitment to reading Keats through poststructuralist orthodoxy, however, does alienate him from poetry and repositions his work as proto-theory. There have been fruitful and elegant posthumanist readings of Keats’s work, which have yielded new insights that situate him well in relation to contempo‐ rary theoretical concerns. Ron Broglio has provided a nuanced and detailed account of the ways in which Romanticism chimes with posthumanist critical ideas, one which is particularly convincing for its assimilation of historical detail, readings of the work, and contemporary theory. Broglio points out that criticism has been reluctant to part with Romantic ideals of personhood, and that it has often failed to see the work critically apart from Romantic self-definitions. By contrast, he writes “a posthumanist Romanticism indicts the poetic Romantic construction of interiority” (2016: 37). Broglio’s account is an important reminder of critical pitfalls in general, and with regard to Romanticism specifically. A dyed-in-the-wool posthuman vision of Keats’s work in particular is found in Anna Anselmo’s “Posthuman Keats: Poetry as Assemblage” (2020). Anselmo argues that Keats’s work is posthuman in the way that Frankenstein’s monster is “other-than-human”: “so is Keats’s DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 56 James Dowthwaite poetry other-than-poetical, managing the impossible balance between intense lyricism and the unpoetical banal” (53). Anselmo’s readings of Keats are careful and skilful, and function, as she writes, on the “micro-poetic” level, but the overall image of Keats’s “cyborg poetry” is more in service of Haraway’s critical project than it is of Keats’s work in the end (2020: 56). In the following, respectfully challenging Broglio and Anselmo, I will rely on the Romantic ideal of personhood and interiority, not because I believe that such terms are always correct, but because I believe they best explain the human-object relation in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Before turning to the poem, however, I will briefly consider Keats’s reflections on the imagination in his letters. Keats’s imagination The imagination is a contested space for Keats, and is not something which we can clearly define and delineate. Charles W. Mahoney has written of Keats’s imagination that it is a particular site of the famously contested notions of “truth and beauty”: “while oftentimes responsive to that which exists in this world, the essential beauty (or truth) that the imagination creates just as often appears to be the product of a dream, of an abandonment of the real for the ideal” (2017: 168). At times the imagination seems a creative power, actively forming a sense of world; at others, it seems a receptive faculty, created by the world. It is unreasonable to expect philosophical fixity from someone as young as Keats, let alone one who has committed themselves, now famously, to “a life of sensations instead of a life of thoughts” (2009b: 36). At the same time, the conviction of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” would suggest a clearly delineated belief. If we turn to his letters, we find much speculation on the imagination, but little clarity regarding its exact nature. That it is related to beauty and truth, and that it apprehends (or creates) objects and events is clear, but not how, nor how it is reconciled with a broader philosophy of life. At times, Keats seems to have a solid sense of what the imagination is and does. An important reference to the imagination, and particularly significant because of its relation to art, can be seen in a letter he wrote to his brother George, and his sister-in-law Georgiana, on 31 December 1818. He recounts viewing a book of prints of Renaissance Italian art at the house of his friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats writes of his feelings on viewing the reproductions of the artworks, that “on my word I have thought so little that I have not one opinion upon anything except in matters of taste—I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty” (2009b: 175). The latter point is, of course, echoed at the end of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 57 though it is not Keats who delivers this statement in that case. It is interesting that it occurs in relation to “matters of taste”, as this narrows the sphere of its application. In this case, Keats refers to his uncertainty regarding matters of truth with regard to the appreciation of artworks, knowing only that he feels beauty for them. This is broadened in the later poem, but this instance should serve to remind us that Keats’s thought on the matter is prompted by questions of aesthetic judgement, rather than metaphysical speculation. He then relates the artworks to the power of his mind: finding them, “grotesque to a curious pitch—yet still making up a fine whole—even finer to me than more accomplish’d works—as there was left so much room for Imagination” (2009b: 175). How much room can be left for imagination is one of the key artistic questions that he would come to address in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, with his answer being a radical assertion of the constitutive power of the imagination itself in the creation, not just the interpretation, of objects. Keats had written to Hayden just over a week earlier (22 nd December 1818), praising the abstract: “I admire Human Nature but I do not like-Men” (163), he informed him. The figure of the Greek vase stayed with Keats, but not as a specific object so much as an occasion for imagination and abstraction. In another letter to his brother and his sister-in-law, written 19 March 1819, he again thinks of the figure of a vase, this time in a state of disinterestedness: “neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase—a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement” (212).-What is particularly interesting about this letter is that these statements occur as part of a wider, and ambivalent, discussion of human nature and the human relation to the world. Keats finds himself alienated from the continual human desire for newness and action, writing that “there is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism” (213). For him, “the pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish”. And yet, in the same letter, he writes of how he pursues “the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of ” (214) in his writing practice. This ambivalence about the “human animal”, its power of imagination, its overreliance on a philosophy of action, its difficulties with truth and beauty, its desire for freedom, desire for happiness, its conflict with the limitation of its circumstances leads him to conclude that: The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun—it cannot escape it, it DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 58 James Dowthwaite 5 The famous translation of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878). See Nietzsche 1996 for the reference, and a scholarly version of the book. cannot destroy its annoyances—they are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature. (232) The references to the green world are important here, as they provide Keats with a broader context, one which the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” tends to aestheticise and subsume within the humanmade qualities of the artwork. But what is most important is that the animal, the nonhuman, world is understood in its symbolic relation to human beings. Even if Keats’s world is “human, all too human”, as Nietzsche’s lament has it, this is the source of its power, and the green world is abstracted into a set of circumstances, its facets becoming like the symbols which move past the poet on the face of a vase. 5 And it is abstracted in turn to what such a vase - or, in its specific funereal condition, an urn - might communicate. Here we must return to the ode. It is worth remembering that Keats opens the poem by emphasising silence. The urn is addressed as the “still unravish'd bride of quietness”, as the “foster-child of silence and slow time” (2009a: 177, ll. 1-2). This silence does not mean that the urn cannot communicate. Far from it, Keats emphasises that the “Sylvan historian” expresses its “flowery tale more sweetly” (177, ll. 3-4), that is, with a finer beauty, than even poetic language. The “leaf-fring’d legend” (177, l. 5) that “haunts” the urn should be understood as its decorative function, its aesthetic identity which, as an artwork, is the only identity it can formally display. Its silence is emphasised further by the rhetorical questions the speaker uses to round off the stanza. As J. Philipp Eggers has put it, “the urn does not transmit its legend to the poet, who, a human historian, must have answers to questions of time, place, and individuality. Its message remains sylvan, pastoral; its only answer to his questions is that no answer is necessary” (1971: 944). That is to say, the only answer it provides is the one imagined by the poet at the end, an act of realisation which is teased out of the silent communication of the urn. So how does the urn communicate? The answer is: aesthetically. It commu‐ nicates by the means by which any aesthetic object should, namely by being all of its formal dimensions. The “leaf fring’d legend” is all of the communication; the figures and forms that the urn has on it are a mode of expressing itself. In many ways, the very form of the poem itself, with Keats’s idiosyncratic stanza form, serves to cultivate a sense of the aesthetic object: “the combination of Shakespearian quatrain with Petrarchan sestet in the ten-line ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ stanza has a balance and assured poise which makes for Keats’s highly characteristic tableau-like effect” (Everest 2021: 11). We might think of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 59 Thomas McFarland’s elegant judgement on Keats’s poetic achievement: “form, that is, the setting of imagination and reality into dialectic opposition and progression, intertwined itself with a focus to transmute ardour, symbolized by Hellas, into a great structure of poetry” (2000: 194). McFarland insists that “the urn, moreover, in its function as ’sylvan historian’ is specifically recording the human perimeters of the world of Hellas; is telling a ‘tale’ of human engagements” (195). To this I would simply add that the urn is not telling so much as being given the imaginative quality of telling by the poet - its speech is metaphorical, even more human. There is a conceit at work here. The urn which expresses itself better than poetic language exists only in the form of poetic language itself. This is not, à la deconstruction, an undoing of the point, but rather a masking of it - the mask being McFarland’s central metaphor for Keats’s poetic practice. The nature of aesthetic communication is what opens the second stanza. The speaker asserts that ”Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (Keats 2009a: 177, l. 11). This is prompted, we are to infer, by images of youths with pipes on the surface of the urn itself. These play “Not to the sensual ear” but instead “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” (177, ll. 13-14). Quite what Keats means by the “spirit” is unclear, but the vagueness is perhaps necessary. In his letters Keats writes often of the “soul”, understood as a metaphysical portion of us, and something accessible to the imagination. It is this imagined quality - whether this is to be understood in fictional, i.e. literary, or theological terms - that characterises the particular being of the urn. In other words, what matters is what it is about the imagined object that communicates, and this can be found in the figures that it depicts. While the second stanza continues the theme of silent communication from the first, it also introduces another quality of the urn: deathlessness. The piper is captured always on the point of playing his music, meaning that he becomes an aesthetic ideal: he is always inseparable from his song. The speaker describes not only the musicians playing silent music, all the more powerful because it is imagined, but also a pair of lovers who are nearly in a state of embrace. Here Keats marks two aspects of the visual artwork - or, in this case, the imagined visual artwork - that distinguishes it from the world of human action. First, the object is motionless: The figures depicted on it are static, and this means that the two lovers are held forever almost on the point of kissing, but never actually consummate their passion. Compensation for this, however, is the second aspect of the artwork that distinguishes it from action, that distinguishes the figures of the lovers from lovers in life - say, for example, Keats’s ill-fortuned love with Fanny Brawne: though they will never kiss, they will also never separate. The artwork, though it tantalises them by holding them DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 60 James Dowthwaite always on the point of kissing, at the very least will always keep them together - and always keep them beautiful. In this, the pathos and the beauty are one. These themes are continued in the third and fourth stanzas, both of which serve to enrich the description of the urn’s figures and to emphasise the apparent ontological differences between the speaker and the aesthetic object of his meditation. The “happy boughs” (177, l. 21) - depictions of trees and foliage - will never be parted from the spring, existing in a state of idealisation denied those who will have to live through winter; equally, the “happy melodist” will always be creating “new” music; its newness deriving its inseparability from the idealised arcadia of its context. That same note of pathos is there in the “happy, happy love” that the urn captures, that “all breathing human passion far above” which manifests itself as a fever in those mortals which view it with hearts “high-sorrowful” (177, ll. 25-29). This ambivalence is an important feature of the speaker’s relationship with the object. The fourth stanza is a series of unanswerable questions. When he or she asks who the figures are who come to “the sacrifice”, what it is that drives the pastoral priest - a kind of holy shepherd - to lead his “heifer” with her “silken flanks with garlands drest” (177, ll. 33-34), or what the identity of the town - emptied for the sacrifice away at the distant, unseen, temple - Keats is really using the speaker to build an imaginative image. These questions cannot be answered on one level, because the artwork itself reveals nothing of its progeny, only of its forms, but also on another level, namely that for the reader of the poem - and probably for its author - the urn is a wholly imaginary object. It has its aesthetic existence only in the questions that the speaker asks of it. This is why the streets of the town “for evermore / Will silent be” (177, ll. 38-39): the contours of the urn do not refer to anything that antiquarianism can reveal; they exist only in the lines and images of the poem, itself an extension of the imagination of the speaker. And so the poem hinges on the outline of, and meditation on, an aesthetic object that has its existence only in the expression of the speaker; the rhetorical questions are not only poetic devices of conceptualisation, but are in fact ontologically constitutive of a unique kind of object, one which is inseparable from the human imagination that sustains it. A shift of perspective towards that of the object, which would be to say, an orientation away from the anthropocentric conception of the human being, such as Latour, Haraway, or Braidotti might rightly promote, becomes difficult here. And yet it is precisely this which Keats affects in the final, haunting stanza. The stanza is, indeed, unsettling, and it is the haunting sense of incongruity which critics such as Eliot have mistaken for confusion on Keats’s part. The “pseudo-statement” which Eliot claims concludes the poem might actually be well-named, but not for the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 61 reasons that he thinks. The statement is really an adaptation of a mask. One must, as Brooks suggests, bear in mind who is speaking, and what the absurdity of the “urn’s” communication might unsettle in us. Keats turns again to the urn as a whole, addressing that “Attic shape! ”, that “Fair attitude! with brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought” (178, ll. 41-42). Michael O’Neill has written of the unsettling aspect of the final stanza that its power lies in the very transformation of a form of life - the ancient Mediterranean, at least as imagined in modernity - into art: “the turning of the Mediterranean to ‘marble’ represents the solidifying of the imagination's other world into the chilling ‘attitude’ of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’s’ last stanza” (2011: 282). In this sense, there is a more general character to Keats’s treatment in the poem, one that applies to all artwork which deals with a concrete place, even if its concretion is the crystallisation of an ideal. This does not apply specifically to imagined objects, though the process of apprehending them might be the same. Either way, the power of the artwork to disrupt quotidian and commonplace, or even complex and abstract, ways of conceiving the world is part of its grand appeal for Keats. This is why he has the speaker refer again to the urn as “Thou silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity” (178, ll. 44-45). The “Cold Pastoral”(177, l. 45) is a thing sublime, speaking the language of sensations and of the soul, a disturbance of rationality. All of this could be assimilated within posthuman and neo-materialist orthodoxies: the object challenges the rational structures through which we believe we have ordered, patterned, understood, and therefore controlled the universe. And there are numerous examples which populate the works of the abovementioned that demonstrate this, but to reach this judgement would be to forget Brooks’s warning and to compound Eliot’s error. It would also be to ignore the wrought complexity of the poem’s final lines, which are worth quoting in full: When old age shall this generation waste, --------------- Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, ---------"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all --------------- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (178, ll. 46-50) Most critical attention has focussed on the assertion of the penultimate line, not only because of its still provocative aestheticist challenge to critical orthodoxy, but also because of its obvious importance to the author of the poem himself. As Nicholas Roe puts it, “the chiasmus with which the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ concludes was an appropriately enigmatic, introverted figure for the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 62 James Dowthwaite nineteenth-century image of Keats” (1998: 12 f.). In an extended treatment of the contention as a proposition for aesthetics, Herbert F. Tucker has demonstrated the lines’ importance for the nineteenth century as a whole: that sibylline pronouncement at the end of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has meant various things to various readers, and indeed the prediction of such variance not only is one of the messages the words harbor but also forms a major clause within the brief that nineteenth-century poetics presented about the utility of aesthetic variability as such. (2022: 101) But those lines, to follow Brooks, should be seen in the context of what surrounds them, and though Keats isolated the contention in other places in his letters, here they are in a very particular dramatic situation: What matters is that an urn, the silence of which has been stressed throughout the poem, speaks them. However, and here my account differs from Brooks’, it is worth remembering that this is imputed speech: though it is subtle, the urn’s speech is really subsumed within the poetic discourse of the speaker - that “thou say’st” is not a reporting of direct speech but instead a translation of its silent aesthetic contours into conditional, imagined lines. It is what an urn - an artwork - would say were it to be able to speak, and this hypothetical point is sustained by the fact that the urn itself is an object of the human imagination, of a fictional materiality, not a physical one. As I have already said above, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is, furthermore, only one of a number of contentions in this passage, and one of three that the urn itself is claimed to make. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is the first contention; the second is that “this is all ye know on earth”; the third is that this “is all ye need to know”. The identity of beauty and truth is a controversial point in and of itself, but the “urn” radicalises this contention further by claiming that it is all that human beings are capable of knowing. This is an unsettling point, but there is some comfort provided in the idea that this is enough, all that we “need to know”. We remain unsettled by the object’s suggestion that there may be more to know than this, but that the limits of the human imagination can only reach so far; even if they reach far enough for a human life. Even this ‘more to know’ cannot really be considered as nonhuman, even if it hints at the limits of the human itself, as it is the imputed limits of the self-reflexive human imagination. And yet even these contentions are embedded in a broader contention, one which contextualises them and provides the true dramatic situation of the poem. This is that these three contentions are what an urn would say were it able to speak. So the communication of the nonhuman urn is possible only in the dis‐ course of the human poet. This remains open to a charge of anthropocentrism, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 63 but the poem itself heads off this charge by means of the unique status of its object: not only is the urn a human-made object, it is imaginative, having its existence sustained only by an act of the human imagination. As an imagined object it cannot, then, be truly nonhuman, contingent as it is on the human imagination. Whatever else Keats’s poem might or might not contend, whatever it might unsettle or upset in philosophy or aesthetic theory, it is a moving record of the existence - the human existence - of such imaginative objects. To reflect, then, on what all this could mean for posthumanist doctrine: if, as Tabbi claims, posthumanism might be seen as a “carrying forward” of humanist ideals, then poems like Keats’s offer an interesting test case. I posed the question at the beginning whether there can be such things as ‘nonhuman’ objects in literary works, because they depend on human imagination. Perhaps the posthumanism of literary studies may lie in the ways in which the human imagination synthesises an imagined, or fictional, capacity - or agency - of objects. Romanticism, with the self-conscious relation of the human imagination and the natural world being so central to its poets, offers a broad and fruitful area of study for this. The lyrical poetry of Keats, for example, is the turning of a human mind on its environment, not on itself; a narrow solipsistic view cannot account for this. Yet, a posthumanist understanding of objects far too often relies on literalist interpretations of what objects in artworks are. Such an interpretation cannot work with a poem in which the ontology of the imagined object is contingent on the creative power of the speaker. If the present author might be indulged a humanist warning: unless it can account for the power of imagination and figurative aesthetic practice in a way that diminishes the control of human creativity, posthumanism will be limited to non-literary objects. And this would be an impoverishment for literary studies and posthumanism alike. Works Cited Anselmo, Anna. 2020. “Posthuman Keats: Poetry as Assemblage”. Altre Modernità, January, 46-58. Arnold, Matthew. 1865. Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon. Bari, Shahidha. 2012. Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations. London: Routledge. Ağın , Başak/ Yılmaz, Z. Gizem. 2025. “Introduction: Towards an Ecological Posthuman‐ ism in English Studies”. 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