john who wrote ode on a grecian urn

The “John” who wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is John Keats , the English Romantic poet, and the poem was composed around May 1819 and published in 1820.

Who John Keats Was

John Keats (1795–1821) was a major second‑generation English Romantic poet, alongside figures like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Despite his short life and modest publication record while alive, his work—especially the great odes of 1819—became some of the most celebrated poetry in English literature.

About “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

• The poem is an ode in five stanzas that addresses an imagined ancient Greek urn as if it were a speaking presence.

• It appeared in Keats’s 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems , which gathered his most important mature work.

Why the Poem Is Famous

• It is often called one of the greatest achievements of Romantic poetry because it explores art, beauty, time, and mortality through vivid scenes painted on the urn.

• The closing line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” has become one of the most frequently quoted and debated statements in all of English poetry.

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