ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Very similar to “On First looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn, ” John Keats is inspired by marble statues and friezes taken from the Parthenon in Athens by Thomas Bruce, also known as Lord Elgin, and put in the British Museum.

Detailed explanation-2: -Keats rendered the urn of his poem, one of six odes, out of many influences, including his friend Benjamin Haydon’s articles on art of antiquity, and from several artworks: the Elgin Marbles, the Townley Vase, Claude Lorrain’s paintings, and the Neo-Attic Sosibios vase (that Keats traced an engraving of), among others.

Detailed explanation-3: -Stephen Hebron explains how a classical object inspired Keats’s consideration of human experience. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is one of the five great odes Keats composed in the summer and autumn of 1819.

Detailed explanation-4: -Keats wrote a sonnet in 1816 entitled “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in which the young, fragile poet’s own mortality is contrasted with “each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship”, the artistic achievement of “Grecian grandeur” and the “magnitude” projected by the sculptures.

Detailed explanation-5: -The sculptures on the east pediment tell the tale of the birth of the goddess Athena, while those on the west depict a battle between Athena and the god Poseidon to determine who would be the patron deity of Athens.