Ode To A Grecian Urn

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e of the recent passing of his brother Tom. Thus troubled, he composes "Ode on a Grecian Urn"in a dialogical attempt to find poetical existence beyond his too-short human lifetime.
As Keats tries to find some sense of permanence in an ever more apparently impermanent and fleeting world, he turns to those objects which he regards as outside of the temporality he, as a mortal man, experiences: the perpetuating, generationless song of the nightingale and the "cold Pastoral"ageless marble scenes on the Grecian Urn, considered by many to be among the "best"of his poetry.
His best poetry is composed largely of representations of representations, meditations "on"objects or texts that are themselves reflections of other artists' creative acts (Scott, xi).
The products of these artists are indeed timeless and eternal, something Keats was very aware, both in the presence of other artists works and in the absence in his own. As Keats tries to create for himself a place among these eternal artists, he employs a type of dialogical ekphrasis: that is he tries to perpetuate dialogue with both the past and the future by employing a genre that allows him to create a "work of art"by describing "works of art, to translate the arrested visual image into the fluid movement of words"(Scott 1). Scott, in his book The Sculpted Word, goes on to say that "Keats must achieve what the heroes of antiquity were given--namely their assured place in the cultural order"(Scott 1). This place in "the cultural order"is what Keats de sperately seeks, and it can only be achieved through ekphrasis and dialogism.
In a surprisingly similar set-up to Bakhtin's paradigm of existence as dialogue, Keats sets up a Spirit-Creation schema in his long letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written February 14-May 3, 1819.
While not directly parallel, one cannot escape the similarity to the following Bakhtinian figure constructed by Michael Holquist:
The self, then, may be co...