<P> George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the poem among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed . His works' rise like an exhalation .' His language has been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select . He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words--Beauty is truth,--truth beauty". The 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the' Ode to the Grecian Urn'; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,--eternal beauty and eternal repose ." During the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold claimed that the passage describing the little town "is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added ." </P> <P> The 20th century marked the beginning of a critical dispute over the final lines of the poem and their relationship to the beauty of the whole work . Poet laureate Robert Bridges sparked the debate when he argued: </P> <P> The thought as enounced in the first stanza is the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfect; and this is true and beautiful; but its amplification in the poem is unprogressive, monotonous, and scattered...which gives an effect of poverty in spite of the beauty . The last stanza enters stumbling upon a pun, but its concluding lines are very fine, and make a sort of recovery with their forcible directness . </P> <P> Bridges believed that the final lines redeemed an otherwise bad poem . Arthur Quiller - Couch responded with a contrary view and claimed that the lines were "a vague observation--to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent ." The debate expanded when I. A. Richards, an English literary critic who analysed Keats's poems in 1929, relied on the final lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to discuss "pseudo-statements" in poetry: </P>

Ode on a grecian urn analysis line by line