Brooks's discussion of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" embodies his use of close reading. In "Keats's Sylvan Historian," he finds the controversy over the poem's famous lines misplaced, and insists instead that "the ambiguity" of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is best understood as an expression of the urn itself (151-153). The poem pursues this ambiguity, he writes, in lines that describe the urn on the one hand as a "bride of quietness" and a "foster-child of silence" and on the other, a "sylvan historian" (155). In this way the poem describes the urn in paradoxical terms much as the urn utters a paradoxical line. Brooks then pursues this logic by considering how "sylvan historian" might not only describe the urn as a kind of historian but also the kind of history the urn is said to tell. Further, if he claims that this history is uncertain because it's not clear "what men or gods" feature in it, he continues that line of thinking as he proceeds through the ode's stanzas: when he emphasizes that the "unheard melodies" of the figures depicted on the urn's face are "sweeter than any audible music," that "action goes on though the actors are motionless," that "the maiden, always to be kissed, never actually kissed," that the "boughs...cannot shed their leaves," and when he claims that this "ironic undercurrent" only increases over the course of the poem, to culminate in those infamous lines (156-159, 164). From following the poem in this way, Brooks arrives at the assertion that his interpretation is "derived from the context of the "Ode" itself" (164).