From the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, the final line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”(Pgh. 5, Lns. 9-10) has made many a critic confused, annoyed, and even disappointed, for in this poem otherwise devoid of a lesson, there is one large, encompassing statement tacked right on the end, to provide closure for the whole piece. For the new critics, that was unacceptable. But that is where Cleaneth Brooks steps in. In the piece Keat’s Sylvan historian by Cleaneth Brooks, he attempts to redefine those final lines into a more substantial statement as opposed to a simply a blanket lesson with no true deeper significance. For example, he clearly states that perhaps the meaning behind these lines does not and can not be simply defined, as the “very ambiguity of the statement…ought to warn us against insisting very much on the statement in isolation, and to drive us back to a consideration of the context in which the statement was set.” (Pg. 141) However, he goes on to write that that does not necessarily mean that by pouring over the writings of Keats we will find the answer to the last lines, as “our specific question is not what did Keats the man perhaps want to assert here about the relation of beauty and truth; it is rather: was Keats the poet able to exemplify that relation in this particular poem”, can its true meaning really be found? (Pg. 141) As Brooks goes on to articulate, one could examine the urn as merely a character, and compare the lines “spoken” by the urn as similar to “Ripeness is all”, the closing lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, or perhaps the urn, or sylvan historian, is reciting ideas that “may be characterized as ‘tales’-not formal history at all” and as such merely stories that aren’t meant to be taken deeper at all. (Pg. 143) He goes on to conclude the piece by proposing that perhaps, “best of all, we might learn to distrust our ability to represent any poem adequately by paraphrase”. (Pg. 152) As he says, such a distrust is healthy, and truly since one can’t exactly find one solid conclusion from this poem, perhaps its greatest meaning is in its ability to convey a vast unknown, but not just any unknown where one can hunt for the answers, but an unknown that can never be known. After reading Brook’s piece, one could think, “how does this guy’s input help? Why do I need his opinion? I can do critical analysis myself.” While it’s true one can draw whatever interpretation one wants from Keats’ poem, one not only gets a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of this poem by looking at another perspective, but a deeper understanding of how one analyses not only poetry but literature as a whole, creating a more expansive reservoir of knowledge and analysis than one had prior to reading this piece, thus shaping our thinking to grow as opposed to hold stagnant as to where we are in the moment.