Abstract

There is an obscure passage in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, written in 1817, which says: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination...This does not seem to make much sense. Nor does it help much to find an echo of that passage in the famous last lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, written two years later: Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.