Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
- Source
- Ode on a Grecian Urn
- Date
- 1820
Meaning of “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are…”
The ode privileges imagined music over audible performance, presenting imagination as capable of sustaining an ideal beauty that physical sound cannot preserve indefinitely.
Where does it come from?
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The line addresses figures represented on the urn and belongs to the poem’s meditation on art, imagination and permanence.
