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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.
Source note: Endymion, Book I, opening line; Project Gutenberg #24280. This is a poetic proposition within a Romantic work, not an empirical rule that every aesthetic experience remains pleasurable forever.
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“The poetry of earth is ceasing never.”
Keats closes the sonnet by insisting that nature’s music changes performers with the seasons but never truly stops.
Source note: On the Grasshopper and Cricket, final line; the cricket continues the earth’s poetry in winter.
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“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.”
Shelley turns the wind into a living seasonal force, opening a poem where destruction, preservation, sound, and renewal are woven together.
Source note: Ode to the West Wind, opening line; Shelley addresses the autumn wind directly.
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“You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the woods.”
Perception depends partly on the observer: poetic meaning in nature emerges when imagination and feeling participate alongside literal observation.
Source note: Pepacton, discussion of poetic interpretation of nature. Burroughs contrasts objective natural-history observation with the poet’s subjective idealization, using Shelley and Keats as examples.
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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”
The compressed closing formula binds beauty and truth inside the ode’s meditation on art, inviting interpretation rather than offering a settled philosophical definition.
Source note: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats: Poems Published in 1820; Project Gutenberg #23684. The words are presented as the urn’s closing message, so the source page preserves the dramatic-poetic framing.
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“She walks in beauty, like the night.”
Byron begins with a comparison that makes beauty a balance of light and darkness rather than a catalog of physical features.
Source note: “She Walks in Beauty,” first stanza, in Hebrew Melodies.