“Have you practiced so long to learn to read? 
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”   Walt Whitman

      In Benson and Stangroom’s 2006 book, Why Truth Matters, the opening paragraph of the first chapter states: “Keats told us that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, and that that is all we know on earth.  Romantic poets had many virtues, but rigor of thought was not always one of them.  It’s hard to think of a less true generalization.”
      Of course, this proclamation by John Keats is paraphrased from the last stanza of the famous Ode To A Grecian Urn in which the poet describes a pastoral scene of men and maidens, cut in low relief on a marble vase:
      (O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede
       Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
       With forest branches and the trodden weed;
       Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
       As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!)
And then, addressing these marble men and maidens on the vase, he brings the poem to its climactic finish with:
      (When old age shall this generation waste,
       Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
       Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
      “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
       Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.)

       John Keats, studied Greek art at the British museum and cultivated a fascination for Greek marble vases.  This precocious poetic genius who once declared that (The only means of strengthening one’s intelligence is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts surely understood—as we all do—that in real life, truth is not always beautiful and beauty is not always truthful. 
      In this most delicate of poems, however, Keats was not generalizing about life.  Rather, he was addressing the artwork on a Greek marble urn and, from it, generalizing about art where, indeed, beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
      Unlike life—where truth may be horribly ugly and beauty, dangerously deceiving—art, which is the honeymoon from life, must be both beautiful and truthful.  Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is a painting that depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.  There is nothing beautiful about this ugly massacre, which killed between 250 and 1600 innocent people and injured many more.  In contrast, Picasso’s world-famous metaphorical rendition of this horrific truth is strikingly beautiful and it is this eerie symbiosis of truth and beauty that marks the painting’s greatness.
      Although many an artist has attempted to define art, no definition has won wide acceptance or acclaim.  When the German impressionist painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935) issued his definitive credo entitled “A Confession of Artistic Faith,” he stated that “To make visible the invisible: that is what we call art.”  In this same spirit, we could perhaps promulgate that Keats (1795-1821) had indeed coined the most famous definition of art: “To make truth beautiful and beauty truthful: that’s what art is all about.”