"Ode on a Grecian Urn": Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy

This volume on the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is part of the Romantic Circles Praxis series on seminal texts in Romantic literature. The eleven contributors were asked not for original scholarship on the "Urn," but for an account of how they teach this hypercanonic text. If it can be assumed that every English major knows something about this poem, this volume tries to identify what it is that they know. These eleven essays suggest that students are confronting the enigmas of Keats's poem just as he contemplated the enigmas of the silent urn, and they show that there is rich variety of methods for bringing students to an appreciation of Keats's uncertainties, mysteries and doubts.