Published Paper Details:

Abstract This article revisits the 1819 odes of John Keats to explore the complexity of his aesthetic philosophy beyond the oft-quoted dictum "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." While this statement from Ode on a Grecian Urn has traditionally been interpreted as the central tenet of Keats's thought, a closer reading of the odes reveals a far more nuanced engagement with themes such as transience, melancholy, imagination, and mortality. Through detailed analysis of Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn, the paper argues that Keats's poetry resists reductive interpretation and instead embraces ambiguity through the principle of Negative Capability. The study highlights how Keats negotiates the tension between permanence and change, pleasure and pain, and imagination and reality, thereby transforming aesthetic experience into a profound existential inquiry. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that Keats's odes articulate a dynamic and evolving vision of beauty--one that is inseparable from human limitation and uncertainty.