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Provide your interpretation of the line "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (line 49) from "Ode on a Grecian Urn." You may use examples from the text to support your interpretation.

a) It means beauty is the essence of truth.
b) It suggests art can capture eternal beauty.
c) It implies that beauty and truth are unrelated.
d) It's open to interpretation.

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Final answer:

Keats's line from 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' can be interpreted in various ways, reflecting the notion that beauty embodies truth and vice versa, which is open to interpretation and suggests that art conveys objective truths about the world.

Step-by-step explanation:

The line "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" from John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn has been a subject of considerable debate among scholars. The interpretation that beauty is the essence of truth, as suggested by option (a), aligns with the perspective of ancient philosophers like Plato who saw an objective essence to beauty. However, this line is profoundly open to interpretation (d), as underscored by the disagreement between Cleanth Brooks and T.S. Eliot. Brooks’s interpretation, which contends that the poem is unified around the paradox of a poem's beauty relating to the truth or falsity it asserts, suggests that the work of art (the urn) itself encapsulates an objective truth and beauty, reflecting literature's capacity to convey truth about the world.

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