John Keats was a bit different from other poets of the second generation. He was peculiar in his own way. The artistic aim in his poetry was always to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. He wrote for beauty, and his leading principle is: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the poet observes a relic of ancient Greek civilization, an urn painted with two scenes from Greek life. The first scene depicts musicians and lovers in a setting of rustic beauty; the second scene shows a priest leading a heifer to sacrifice at some “green altar”. The speaker attempts to identify with the characters, because to him they represent the timeless perfection only art can capture. The main thing that captures the speaker's attention about this urn is that the figures on it are frozen in time in the middle of what they were doing and they will remain there, unchanged, for eternity. Filled with dualities—time and timelessness, silence and sound, the static and the eternal—the urn in the end is a riddle that has “teased” the speaker into believing that beauty is truth. In life, however, beauty is not necessarily truth, and the urn's message is one appropriate only in the rarefied, timeless world of art.