Who wrote the poem 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?

John Keats wrote the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Keats composed the ode in May 1819, during an extraordinarily productive period when he also wrote “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” and other major poems. He was then 23 and had recently abandoned medical work to devote himself to poetry.

The poem addresses an imagined ancient Greek urn and examines the relationship between art, beauty, time, and human experience. Its five ten-line stanzas describe scenes painted on the vessel, including musicians who play forever and lovers who remain eternally close without completing their pursuit.

A common mix-up is to associate the poem with Percy Bysshe Shelley or Lord Byron, other leading English Romantic poets. They were Keats’s contemporaries, but neither wrote this ode. It was first published anonymously in 1820 in the Annals of the Fine Arts and later appeared in Keats’s collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.