Beautiful Everything!

Enlightenment Prompt #13

Beauty is truth and

truth, beauty, said Mr. Keats -

Look! It's everywhere!

Ladbroke Grove, London. Collage by Morgan Buchanan

In yesterday's enlightenment prompt I mentioned John Keats and his poem Ode To A Grecian Urn. He ends that poem with these two lines:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Posthumous portrait of John Keats by William Hilton, c. 1822

Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences. Truth is usually held to be the opposite of a false statement.

If truth can be defined as words, actions or states of existence that are in accord with reality, and, according to Keats, beauty is truth, then beauty is anything that is in accordance with reality. 

So what kind of beauty is that? It is one that we perceive with our senses, since it is “all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".

Having just written a long poem about an ancient vase, perhaps Keats is suggesting that all things are beautiful, all reality because, just by existing, it is inherently true.

“all ye need to know on earth” implies that there is a greater truth-beauty that lies behind the one we experience through the senses, a greater reality that this one points to in every object and being around us. 

I discussed a similar idea, relating to inherent symmetry in our perception of nature, here.

The question isn't “what is beautiful?”, but rather, “what isn't beautiful?” Copying and mirroring the same image of a suburban underpass in London, (that is not generally considered beautiful) I created a collage (above) to reveal the scene's inherent symmetry and show a beauty that is so easy to miss if we don't slow down and see what's before us.

So, what are some practical techniques we can apply immediately to align ourselves to the consciousness that Keats touched upon in his poem?

Read on for today's practical methods that will help make us more artistically sensitive, but also genuinely more happy about the world and our place in it.