<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> <P> On the one hand there are very many people who, if they read any poetry at all, try to take all its statements seriously--and find them silly...This may seem an absurd mistake but, alas! it is none the less common . On the other hand there are those who succeed too well, who swallow' Beauty is truth, truth beauty...,' as the quintessence of an aesthetic philosophy, not as the expression of a certain blend of feelings, and proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle - mindedness as a result of their linguistic naivety . </P> <P> Poet and critic T.S. Eliot, in his 1929 "Dante" essay, responded to Richards: </P>

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